Thursday, April 5, 2007

SportsFanBase.com Update

It's been a couple of weeks but I am back for an update. SportsFanBase.com has been doing fairly well as we approach the 1,000 member mark. Traffic has still stayed fairly consistent at about 35,000-45,000 hits per week. In fact, SportsFanBase.com had 2 days of over 20,000 hits in one day! March 12th we had over 20,000 hits because of the NCAA Tournament and April 1st, the opening day of Major League Baseball, marked the 2nd day of over 20,000 hits. For March, SportsFanBase.com finished with a total of over 162,000 hits. Once again, this hits a new high and shows that traffic to the website continues to grow.

In terms of promotion, The Wilmington Blue Rocks and Bakersfield Blaze promotions look to be headed down the right path. In fact, I, along with some helpers, will be at the Saturday May 19th Blue Rocks game in our SportsFanBase gear to promote the website. Then, on Saturday June 29th I will be out in California promoting at Bakersfield. So these two promotions should really help increase customer awareness on two different sides of the country.

I have also been looking into Search Engine Optimization, which would help SportsFanBase.com by placing the website higher when Internet users search for 'sports' or 'fan' or 'sports fan.' This is a somewhat expensive operation, so I am going to wait to do this some time in the near future. I may decide to do it once the football season starts and as my baseball promotion at the ballparks ends.

Advertising revenue continues to be a little bit slow, but I still have some solid leads and I locked up my sponsor of the Predictions contest for the month of May. I am looking into recruiting Marketing majors from Rider University that would work as an intern on commission basis to sell ad space on SportsFanBase.com. This would help me since I am basically running the website myself at this point.

In terms of ways to cut expenses, I am thinking of eliminating Rommel's Rant from SportsFanBase.com, which is a section where I have a paid columnist write a new editorial every week. This part of the website doesn't seem to be that popular and because of it, I am losing money right now since ad revenue is slow.

So things are still going fairly well and my business is surviving. The members on the site love going on, so I have a decent loyal customer base. As long as I can continue to keep the site up and running and continue to develop it (I have more ideas than there are hours in a day), SportsFanBase.com could really be something special.

1 comment:

Doug Beck said...

Ari, traffic has become an issue for More2Cell as well; we are looking for a cost-effective means of driving more TARGETED traffic to our storefront, but I can't seem to find something that fits that profile.

Do you have any ideas or sites that you have come across that have a reliable, cost-effective traffic generating solution?

I am familiar with AdWords to a point, but have found it to be a bit pricey. What do you think?