How to Make Money Online Talking About Sports

Few things beat the excitement of watching your favorite sport, whether it be at home on the telly or live amongst all the action.

But the fun doesn’t have to stop there. If you’re passionate about a particular sport, and willing to put some effort in, you can actually earn money sharing your commentary with others!

Here’s three ways you can make money online by talking about sports:

1. Create a sports blog
2. Contribute to someone else’s sports blog
3. Create a sports commentary YouTube channel

In this article we will go over these three avenues in depth to see how to efficiently earn money with your sport’s passion. Let’s get started!

1. Create a Sports Blog

The first way to earn cash talking about sports on the internet is by creating your own sports blog to share your passion with others!

To do this, you would first need to start a simple website. And don’t worry, starting a website doesn’t take a ton of knowhow, or cost. In fact, the link above takes you to a page where I show you how to get started for free and create your site in less than a minute.

Perhaps just as important as creating the website is figuring out what you want your focus to be on – what will your niche be? 

You don’t want to be too generic, you want to nail down your passion into as specific a category as possible.

For example, if you love all sports, but really have a passion for professional basketball vintage memorabilia, then maybe that would be a good thing to have as the focus of your blog.

Or you could start a site giving football tips, teaching people how to play golf, improve their soccer skills… there are literally 1,000’s of potential niches you could choose from.

After you’ve picked out your niche and completed your website, you’ll want to draw traffic to your blog and decide how to best make money off of it. 

And one of the most common ways to make money on a blog is by affiliate marketing. If you do not know what affiliate marketing is, there is a great article about it here that walks you though the entire process.

But long story short, affiliate marketing is where you get paid to promote other people’s products on your site. And the way you could incorporate this kind of marketing into your sports blog would be by promoting relevant offers to your audience.

Which can include anything from sports memorabilia and merchandise, to sports betting sites and sporting equipment. There are many options here depending on your niche.

All you need to do to find sporting related products to promote, is “Google” something like “football affiliate program” (or whatever sport you’re into), which will bring up a list of companies that are looking for affiliates.

And from here, you can visit the individual company sites to see what products you can promote and what sort of commissions they’re paying. And to see if you can work with them directly, or through sites like ShareASale or CJ Affiliate which is common.

You might be surprised at what you find too. Even well known companies like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour for example. Virtually every company works with affiliates because they’re only paying you when you send them customers through your blog.

How much could you earn this way?

After you start gaining traffic to your blog, you can expect to make anywhere from a few extra bucks to 6 figures per year, which is what I earn doing affiliate marketing.

But how much you earn really depends on how much traffic you get to your site, what you promote, and how much effort you put into developing your skills as an affiliate.

And that’s where having access to proper training comes into play. It’s easy enough to get started, but if you want to make real money, you need to educate yourself properly.

Read: Complete Beginner’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing

It’s also worth noting that this method takes time and effort, it definitely won’t happen overnight. You’ll have to write blog posts consistently, and for a few months see even a small number of readers at first.

But don’t get discouraged! It’s normal for this type of thing to start out a little slower. You just have to keep at it and hone in your skills, and over time you’ll start to see your site thrive.

2. Contribute to Someone Else’s Sports Blog

If creating your own sports blog sounds like too much work and you’re looking for something to bring in money a little quicker, then maybe writing for someone else’s sports blog would be the way to go for you.

You’ll start earning faster because, well, you don’t have to go through the whole process of building your reader base – someone else has already done that work for you. Of course, you’ll need to have exemplary writing skills (or at least proper grammar) to get hired.

But if you can learn how to write engaging blog posts (which is actually quite easy when you’re writing about something you already enjoy), then you’ll be able to land a job with someone.

The process is different for different websites, but we’ll take a look at a popular one as an example:

One site you can write for is called LWOS. It’s a company that has sports sites covering nearly all ends of the sport spectrum. In order to become a contributor for LWOS, you just visit their website and click on the “Write For Us” button.

The application process is pretty simple. They ask you to write a sample article that is between 500-1000 words focused on analysis of a game, player, team, or a league issue.

The word count is important to stay within, especially on a sample article. It will demonstrate how well you listen to instruction.

Another tip: don’t add in any fluff to up the word count. Each sentence should add something new of value to the reader.

Go back through and clean it up once you’ve written it to take out any filler words when you’re done. The goal is to pack as much relevant information as possible. 

The article also has to be in third person, so using pronouns like he, she, it, or they. 

They’ll also have you let them know which team you are most interested in covering. 

After giving them 48-72 hours to review your article, you should hear back from them. If you get hired, then you’re ready to start writing. 

The way you make money from LWOS is by getting paid based on the traffic to the article you wrote. There’s no ceiling to the pay, which sounds great at first. If you write an outstanding article that gets tons of traffic, you could make a lot.

Alternatively, if you write tons of articles – even if they don’t get a lot of traffic apiece – the sheer amount will add up eventually.

However, this setup isn’t always worth it. You could spend a lot of time writing genuinely good articles and not get paid what they’re worth just because it didn’t reach enough people.

As a freelance writer, marketing the articles isn’t your job. You should get paid for what you write, anything that comes above that is a bonus.

Yes, you should try to drive traffic to the site you’re writing for by following the guidelines set by the site owner and by producing quality work.

But ultimately, if your pay is based on traffic, you could be waiting a long time before you see a decent amount of money coming in.

However, working for companies/sites with setups like this (such as LWOS) is a great way for someone without lots of experience to build up their resume and get a portfolio of published work started.

That could help you land other, higher-paying clients later down the road. Or if that site isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other sports blogs you can write for worth checking out.

3. Create a Sports Commentary YouTube Channel

Now, if writing blogs isn’t your forte, or you’re simply more into the actual act of talking about sports, then you should consider making a YouTube channel!

This can obviously be just videos sharing your passion about different sports teams or specific players, but if you are someone who loves to be an at-home commentator on sports games, then you could focus on that, too. 

Regardless, the main thing you’ll want to do is produce a quality, entertaining video that people would want to watch!

Creating a YouTube channel is very simple – most people have one already. All you have to do is make your videos and upload them to your account.

You can use your personal account or create a separate account for this focus alone. Either way, you’ll want to upload a relevant channel picture and update any information on your channel’s “about me” section.

It’s important to remember that you’re still essentially creating a type of “brand” for yourself. Your viewers will be coming to watch you for two reasons:

1. You have something new/interesting to say
2. You’re entertaining when you say it

Like with a blog, you’ll have to post content regularly. Although you could probably get by with posting videos once or twice a week as opposed to daily. The most important thing is to post regularly on a schedule.

When it comes to making money on YouTube, it’s a very traffic-based setup and will probably take you a little bit of time (and possibly money) to bring in viewers and subscribers.

You make money through the ad monetization feature, which means that you get paid when ads are shown on your video either before, during, or after.

You can only monetize your channel on YouTube once certain conditions are met: namely that you have to have a certain number of views and have gained a certain number of subscribers within the past year.

Every minute, nearly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. So, it can be extremely difficult to get people to watch your video organically. It can definitely take a long time if you go this route.

In order to drive traffic to your YouTube channel faster, you can use Google AdWords to get your video advertised. Yes, this will cost you some money. However, this will drive more traffic to your channel as well. As your channel gets more (relevant) views, the more interactions you’ll get (such as likes and comments), then the more YouTube will start promoting it to others for free.

For example, once your video starts getting views, likes, and comments, it’ll start appearing in other people’s “watch next” or “recommended” feeds. This will drive more relevant traffic to you for free.

And of course, the more interested people that see your videos, the more subscribers you’ll get, and the less you’ll have to use ads to get your videos out there. 

Once you get your channel monetized, then you could make an average of $3 to $5 per 1,000 views. This may not seem like a lot at first, but if you can really get a solid YouTube channel going, you can earn some decent income. 

For example, if you only posted one video a day that got 20,000 views each, you could be making $60 to $100 off of each video – or $60-$100 per day!

Another option is to place affiliate links in the description of your videos, to earn commissions promoting relevant products. Which is kind of like what we talked about earlier, but instead of promoting stuff on your site, you are using YouTube. Which is something many successful Youtubers do.

Conclusion

In the end, talking about sports online is a potentially great way to earn money. However, you have to be patient! No matter which avenue you take, there isn’t a “get-rich-quick” option.

They all require a consistent amount of work over a decent period of time. But, if you can stick with it, it can pay off and you can earn your income talking about your passion on the web!