Thursday, April 26, 2007

Final SportsFanBase.com Post

Hello everyone! This will be my final post as a participant in the Student Venture Experience. Let me just first say that this has been a great experience for me and Dr. Chaganti & Dr. Cook have really helped me along the way.

OK, now for the updates ...

Well, SportsFanBase.com reached its 1,000th member! As of April 26th at 4:30 PM, SportsFanBase.com had 1,029 members. Traffic continues to be pretty high as we are getting into the thick of baseball season. For April, SportsFanBase.com should reach over the 160,000 hit mark for the 2nd consecutive month. Also, unique visitors have been pretty high and I am not sure of the numbers at this point, but April may be a new high month for unique visitors.

The promotions I am running have not shown too much benefit thus far, but it is still early in the year. On Saturday May 19th, I along with the "Jenns" (who are the spokesmodels of SportsFanBase.com) and some other volunteers will be going to a Wilmington Blue Rocks game to promote SportsFanBase.com. This promotion comes with the marketing package that I originally paid for at the beginning of the season. I have bought a banner and photos of the Jenns for them to sign as souveneirs. I will be putting together a little brochure that will be handed out to fans at the game. So hopefully that promotion goes well. I am doing something similar on June 29th at the Bakersfield Blaze stadium in Bakersfield, California.

For the near future, I will be looking into "beefing" up SportsFanBase.com a little bit more by expanding on some current features and adding some new features that should increase traffic to the site. In addition, I will be looking into starting my Internet Marketing Strategy by using Search Engine Optimization. I should be earning some extra money that I will put into the business to start my SEO campaign. This should increase traffic and new members. The SEO campaign will last about 6 months.

As far as advertisers go, All Sports Connection just signed up for 3 months for a side banner and horizontal top rotational banner. I am currently in talks with 2 other companies that seem to be interested in advertising.

But another new big development has happened - I have started a marketing internship program run through Rider University and I will have 2 summer interns that will be helping me with selling advertising space and gaining sponsors. I am highly looking forward to this program and it should help me bring in more advertisers and sponsors.

Looking at the long-term, I realized that SportsFanBase.com can really become something special. With only doing minimal promotion and really not having much time to put into SportsFanBase.com, I really feel it can go a lot further. Using SEO and the college campus tour I plan on doing (which I am probably year or two away from doing), SportsFanBase.com can reach new heights. And with the help of these interns, selling advertising space and getting sponsors will be a lot easier.

So although SportsFanBase.com is not generating a whole lot of revenue at this point, the long-run return can potentially be very favorable.

To sum up, I just want to say thank you to Rider University, Dr. Cook, and Dr. Chaganti for helping me in this effort to grow my entrepreneurial spirit and to grow SportsFanBase.com.

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