I am a full time web developer, who also happens to be a fan of a particular globally followed sports team.
An idea came to me to build a news/magazine type website about the team I follow. I read news and gossip on the team every day anyway, as well as posting on a fans forum, so making my own articles and promoting a fan website wouldn't be too much of a chore.
I have started with a build on Wordpress. I probably need to build up a bank of about 50 articles and then try to promote this online to get the ball rolling.
Has anyone started a news type blog and had any success?
For me its a zero cost setup except a little time, just 20/30 minutes a day initially to get it going.
The long term view would be to have a few ads on there to generate a little side money if the traffics became in any way large. I know this wont be a million dollar business, but does anyone have any advice?
I love entrepreneurs and new businesses and side gigs - so please don't take offense at my questions:
- How many articles/blog posts have you written before?
- If you have, how many days or weeks have you written then in a row?
- How long did it take you to write a post or article?
I have no doubts about your ability to quickly and cheaply create a great looking site (and I'm jealous of those skills). But if you haven't created content from scratch before, I'd encourage you to give it a try. See if you can write 3 posts/articles a week for the next month. At the end of the month, you'll have a nice start to draw from - and I suspect you'll find that it may be harder than you think - at least to create content that draws new traffic and competes well with professional sports writers/bloggers.
Other thoughts:
- one challenge is that sports info almost always has to be
timely - very timely. Fans want analysis of the last game/match, the last trade, etc.
right away. They aren't interested in analysis of last week's game/match - that's old news. So this works against the ability to create a lot of content that you can draw from over time. (Perhaps there could be some player profiles or other things that don't need to be timely.
- continually creating content is a big challenge. I've tried and I'm not great at being consistent at it. It helps that you're personally interested in the topic and you're watching the games anyway, but that isn't enough. Would you be willing to partner with someone who is a good/experienced writer? Or at least bring in other help?
- could you create a site that brings together stories about the team from a variety of sites? I'm not sure of the legal issues of this, but a site that is filled with links to other people's stories/review of the team? This tends to draw traffic away from your site, but at least they might start there.
Good luck with this, I hope it works out.
