How do I attract a hockey website sponsorship?

Question

I have a hockey web site - www.wideworldofhockey.com that does very well in search engines for terms such as "hockey stores", "hockey stores online", "pittsburgh hockey stores", "pittsburgh sporting goods stores", and many others.

I want to attract "sponsors" to help offset my monthly website expenses. How do I attract "sponsors", be they companies or individuals? What "incentive" can I offer them, knowing in advance my search engine rankings?

Finally, how do I determine a reasonable fee for advertising a sponsor on my site? Should it be a monthly or one-time fee? What criteria should I use in determining the fee amount?

All insights are greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Your best bet would be to check with local stores first about advertising on your site. I would recommend that you have your websites stats to use as a selling point.

Answer 2

Before you try and attract paying sponsors you need to redesign the site. here is why..

If I where a company that did consider paying to advertise on your site I would have a problem with all the "free links" other companies are getting, all those listed at the bottom of the page and the stupid flashing banners on the left. If I'm spending money on advertising I want to be well placed and not surrounded by other links that are not paying.

What you should do is create a link page for all of those links at the bottom of the page, "CBS SportsLine, CBC Sports Online etc". None of those sites are going to link to your site at this point, so no need to send them traffic. Also the ads for 1 and 1 and free websubmission make the site look more like a hobby page.

Also there is very little content on your website. Try adding a simple blog. write a little bit of content each day. If you created a few dozen pages with some basic hockey rules, how to get started, things to look for in a league, why play hockey etc.

I ran into way to many ads and way to little content. If you create content and spread your banner ads out more evenly. If you add a small description to each link, for example:

INSIDE USA HOCKEY
http://www.usahockey.com/
USA Hockey Inc., is the national governing body for the sport of ice hockey in the United States. As such, its mission is to promote the growth of hockey and provide the best possible experience for all participants by encouraging, developing, advancing and administering the sport.

This gives you A) more content B) the reader an idea of the type of site and more information about it. The more you customize this information the more people will visit your site compared to just searching Google or yahoo.

Also sign up for Google Analytics, this will give you a way to document your traffic. I have sites that are the top search result for particular keywords, but generate very little traffic. Show numbers to back up your claims.