5 Ways to Display Advertising on Your Sports Website

When it comes to running a sports club, one of the most important jobs is to find funding for your team. After all, without funds, you’ll have a hard time going to matches and buying the proper gear for your sports team players. 

One of the ways to find funds for your team is to display advertising on your sports website. In this post, we’ll talk about different ways to find suitable advertising and how to display it on your website. 

Different Forms Of Advertising

Here are some of the most common forms of advertising that you can explore and use to monetize your sports website. 

Display Advertising

Display advertising refers to personalized ads that appear on websites, social media platforms or mobile apps. In most cases, those ads are served through Google Display Network which is one of the largest display ad platforms in the world. 

The primary objective of display ads is to get viewers to click on the ad to learn more about the offer advertised. It’s not unusual for display ads to retarget you, meaning you start seeing ads for a specific product after you initially viewed or interacted with the product’s website or social media profile. 

Display ads are the easiest to start with as all you have to do is sign up for an ad network. However, you need a significant amount of website traffic to get a decent payout. You also have very little control over what ads will show so you may wind up with completely irrelevant ads. 

You can get started with display ads by signing up for Google AdSense or another display ad network like Adknowledge, Apple Advertising, Taboola, and others.

Direct Ads

Another type of advertising that’s fairly common in the online space is direct advertising. This refers to website owners selling ad space and interested companies paying for that space to advertise their products or their business in general. 

Direct ads tend to pay out more as you’re in control of how much you charge for ad space. It also gives you more control over the type of ads your website will show. 

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing refers to promoting someone else’s product for a commission. The way it works is simple: you get a special affiliate link and use it on your website in a blog post or on a page. 

For each person that clicks and makes a purchase through your link, you get a percentage of a sale which is known as a commission. The percentage can range anywhere from 10% to 30% and more, depending on the company and the niche. 

Since you choose which affiliate program you’ll apply for, you have a great deal of control over the products you’re promoting and the ads that will be displayed on your site. 

Affiliate marketing can be a decent way to make money, however, you have to make sure the product is something your website visitors would be interested in. It also works better if you can create helpful content around it instead of just placing a banner in your sidebar. 

Sponsored Content

Lastly, sponsored content is another form of advertising where you publish a blog post or another piece of content that promotes a specific product, service or business with a link back to their website. 

Another type of sponsored content is simply a link that you put on a page on your site that tells visitors to go visit it. In some cases, your visitors will be able to get a special deal like a discount, BOGO (Buy One Get One) offer or another type of deal.

You can also add this link at the bottom of each blog post you publish and say that the post has been sponsored by that particular company. 

Similarly to affiliate marketing, sponsored content puts you in control. If you’re approached by a company that wants you to publish their blog post or include their link, it’s entirely up to you whether you accept the offer or not. This means there’s no risk of advertising products you don’t feel comfortable promoting or that wouldn’t be interesting to your audience.

How To Display Advertising On Your Website

Now that you know what are different forms of advertising, let’s take a look at how you can display advertising on your sports website. 

Website Header And Footer

Website header is typically the prime spot for displaying ads on your website since the header is the first thing your visitors see. It’s a great spot for display ads, affiliate marketing banners or direct ad banners. 

Similarly, your website footer can also be an effective place to display ads. It’s the last thing your visitors see before navigating away so this is a good spot to include display ads or affiliate marketing banners.

Blog Sidebar

Blog sidebar is another prime spot for displaying ads. Your sidebar is a great choice for display ads and affiliate marketing banners. It’s also a great spot for selling direct ad space.

You also have more variety in ad banner sizes with a sidebar. You can display square or rectangle ads as well as tall rectangles known as skyscraper banners. 

Within Or Below Blog Posts

Blog posts work best for affiliate marketing and sponsored content. However, you can also use blog posts for display ads and direct ad space. Ideally, your ad shouldn’t interrupt the flow of the post. 

For example, if you have a paragraph followed by a list of links or a video, the ad shouldn’t be in between them. 

If you decide to display ads in a blog post, play around with the placement to ensure your readers and visitors aren’t getting annoyed by the ads in the middle of your blog post. 

You can also display ads below blog posts. This is a great solution because it won’t disrupt your content and your visitors will still see the ad. 

Video Ads

If you’re publishing a lot of video content (like your match replays), you can insert ads at the beginning of your video, in the middle or just before it ends. You can use this with Google AdSense and insert ads into any Youtube videos that you’ve published. 

You can also use video ads with direct ads and sponsored content and promote them either at the beginning or at the end of your videos.

Sponsor Page

Finally, don’t forget that you can also have a dedicated sponsor page where you can include logos that link to your sponsor websites. This approach also works well for affiliate marketing. 

Keep in mind that if you decide to use a sponsor page, don’t go overboard with sponsors and affiliate products as this will only overwhelm your visitors. 

Final Thoughts 

As you can see, there are different forms of advertising that you can take advantage of to monetize your site and make money for your sports team’s needs. You can display advertising in different ways on your site so be sure to download our cheat sheet to keep handy as you start exploring advertising options for your sports website.