Building (or Modifying) Your Tournament Website

Soccer lends itself to the internet perhaps more than any other sport. Soccer families are often more affluent than average, and most have access to several computers, both at home and at work. They are also more likely to have high-speed internet access and, as fans of the world’s game, have long been accustomed to checking the internet for scores of their favorite teams from all around the globe.

For these reasons, and many others, a soccer tournament without a complete, up-to-date, interactive website will be at a serious disadvantage when it comes to marketing their event.

More than Just a Digital Ad

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that a tournament website is just a marketing device. Some tournament directors view a website in the same light as a newspaper ad. They see it as a marketing expense that should be kept as low as possible, done once at the beginning of the year, and never looked at again until it’s time to update it for next year’s event.

But what if your tournament website could actually be a source of income?

Since the vast majority of tournaments are run as fundraisers, the idea of using a website to maximize revenues could well be one whose time has come. Here are a number of ways that a well-built website can generate income for a hosting club.

1. Online signups. There are many tournaments that, while promoted using a tournament website, still require registrations to be done via the good old US postal service. Many others do have online registration, but then require visiting teams to complete the registration by putting a check in the mail.

Should the coach neglect to do that, or change their mind after hitting submit, the registration is all for naught and the revenue opportunity is lost. Worse yet, if a coach likes the look of your tournament, but can not sign up on line, he may continue surfing and find another tournament that does accept online application and sign up for that one instead.

Allowing coaches to register and pay their application fee via the website is a way to close that sale while the surfing coach or team manager is in a buying mood.

2. Sale of tournament t-shirts and souvenirs. Many tournaments print up hundreds, or even thousands of t-shirts and/or sweatshirts, in the hope that participating players will buy them as souvenirs when they attend the event. The problem with this method is that judging the quantity needed prior to the event can be difficult, and any judgment, no matter how good, can be thrown out of kilter by bad weather. No tournament director wants to be left with unsold inventory, so the tendency is to err on the side of caution and order fewer than might be needed, thus losing possible sales.

An online store where participating teams could pre-order their t-shirts can, not only make it much easier to judge anticipated demand, but also close on sales that might otherwise never have materialized. And your online store could stay open long after the event is over so people who wanted a style or size that had been sold out at the tournament could back-order their shirt after they have returned home.

3. Affiliate relationships. Sending a visiting coach or team manager directly from your tournament website to an affiliate merchant’s site (say, one of your sponsoring hotels, or an airline) could cause a commission to be paid back to your club. It’s all done with cookies (the type that reside on hard drives, not the ones with chocolate chips in them), and there is an entire affiliate marketing industry out there that allows thousands of websites (including ours, by the way) to earn considerable income from merchant relationships like that. There’s a ton of information about affiliate marketing here. Check it out. There may be a whole new untapped revenue source for your club.

4. Google AdSense. Ever surfed onto a website and seen a selection of “classified-type” ads with a label that says, Ads by Gooooooogle? That is AdSense, and it is how Google makes most of it’s billions of dollars in yearly revenue, and how website publishers make additional income from their targeted traffic.

Basically, Google sells the ads on a per-click basis. It then uses it’s highly sophisticated search technology to place those ads only on sites that contain matching content. Website owners can place Google’s “magic code” on their sites and be paid a portion of the ad revenue any time a visitor clicks an ad.

If your tournament website generates enough traffic, and if you sign up for Google’s AdSense program, your club could earn anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars per click from AdSense.

Content is King

The key to building a profitable tournament website is good content. If your visitors can see lots of interesting content, not just about your tournament, but about things to do in the area, places to stay in town, transportation options, coaching tips etc. They will spend more time at your site.

Moreover, search engines love good content and will rank your site highly when people type in the appropriate search keywords. That will build your traffic, which will increase your ability to steer your visitors either to your sign-up page, your online store or to your affiliate partners’ links. And if they should happen to click a Google ad on their way through, hey presto, you’ve made a little money off of that, too.

So Content leads to Traffic, which leads to PreSelling opportunities, which leads to Money. C+T+P+M is the cornerstone of the software program we used to build this site. It's called Site Build It!, and the program helps small businesses, organizations and individuals build websites the right way, so that they can be traffic-generating profit centers, rather than just the digital equivalent of expensive newspaper ads. We had a blast building our SBI! site. And it cost us less than $300!

A Few Website Dos and Don’ts

Do consider building or rebuilding your tournament website so that it becomes more than just an announcement of your tournament, but a profit center in its own right.

Don’t simply add a tournament page to your existing club or league site. This may seem like a convenient, low-cost option, but a better way to go is to have a dedicated tournament website, with its own domain name, that can be linked to from the club’s homepage. That way, search engines will find you more easily, and that will lead to increased traffic and greater awareness of your tournament.

Do try and control the content of your site yourself, rather than having it uploaded by a third party “webmaster”. The idea may seem daunting to a computer novice, but don’t worry. The days are long gone when you needed to be an HTML wizard to build and maintain a website. New software has made it as easy to build a website “block by block” as it is to build a simple newspaper ad using a desktop publishing program. And the control of content is something you’ll cherish.

Don’t spend a fortune having a professional web designer build your tournament website. The internet is full of sites for doctors’ practices and consulting firms that cost thousands to build and generate little to no traffic. A perfectly good website can be built in house for a few hundred dollars. The motives of anyone who charges you more should be viewed with extreme suspicion.

Do try to think long-term when mapping out your web strategy. Consider the tournament director I once knew who thought he was getting a great deal when a local high school senior agreed to build a tournament website for free as part of a computer class project he had been assigned. The site turned out fine. Trouble was, a year later that same high school senior was in college in North Carolina, and his exams came along at just about the same time that the tournament schedule needed to be uploaded to the website. He was the only person who could do it and, while uploading the schedules may have been a top priority for the tournament director, it certainly wasn’t for the teenage webmaster.

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