In early January 2011, this article was one of the first ever written in the Soccerwidow blog. I remember it clearly; another hot, sunny day on the verandah of our residence in Lugala, towards the end of our 2-year stay in beautiful Uganda…


There is hardly a Ugandan male who is not fanatical about the English Premier League. Arsenal is the most popular team closely followed by Manchester United, and then smaller support for teams like Chelsea and Liverpool. Many, many of the local ‘Matatu’ mini-bus and ‘Boda-Boda’ motorcycle taxis are adorned with club logos, team or player names splashed across the windscreen sun-shield vinyls, let alone the number of people walking the streets wearing replica shirts (mostly Chinese fakes).

This is not a Ugandan phenomenon either; I am told that in former times the boda-boda stage outside AIG’s office in Nairobi, Kenya (AIG being a previous Manchester United shirt sponsor) was simply known by everyone as ‘Man U’. If you wanted to reach AIG’s office, one simply had to say, “go to Man U”. However, it is amusing that not many of the Ugandans I asked actually know where England is or that England is in Europe or even where Europe is.

Photo: u.g. boy (Skyscrapercity)

Arsenal is apparently the most popular team simply because of its recent history of fielding more African players than any other team. Also, they were the most successful and glamorous club in England when satellite TV was introduced into Uganda and people began to follow football for the first time.

Many people jumped on the Arsenal bandwagon as they completed their unbeaten league season in 2003-04.

As I mentioned, football club logos are seen everywhere from buildings to vehicles and in most cases have been carefully painted by hand. A lot of time and effort goes into parading support for a football team they are only ever likely to watch on TV and which plays football in a country that they are never likely to visit.

In Uganda, English football games are broadcast via the South African satellite service, DSTV, via their Super Sports channels. These live feeds are also watched by radio stations who then give commentaries in the local Lugandan language only.

On a Saturday afternoon, up to three games are shown simultaneously, whereas in England it is not possible to watch a 15.00 hrs Saturday kick-off at all. Therefore, for my (English) husband, Uganda, apart from the constantly beautiful weather, is simply a football paradise. If you support Arsenal or Manchester United especially, you have live TV access to literally every game they play whichever competition they are playing in.

Perhaps you need to access blocked sites (e.g. Betfair, BBC, Facebook, etc.) that are temporarily or permanently not accessible due to your location, or maybe you need to take advantage of P2P and torrent sites?

View from my study in Tenerife

Physical Location may Cause Headaches for Internet Users

I must admit that until recently I had not spent a lot of time thinking about this topic as I have never lived in a country where access to any Web sites was ever an issue. However, I recently spent some time in Tenerife and immediately noticed with horror that I was unable to access Betfair to finish researching certain article topics I had in mind.

Unfortunately, my income depends on having constant and uninterrupted access to exchanges and bookmakers. It is impossible to run a betting advisory Web site with only limited access to the market. Although Tenerife offers a lot of sun and quite an acceptable standard of Internet my downfall was that I was simply blocked from logging in to some of my accounts.

In addition to the log-in problem, some of the sites I could access were only displaying in Spanish, without any option of changing the language settings (e.g. Betfair). Furthermore, only a limited number of markets were displayed and within these, only the back prices.

After recovering from the initial shock, I remembered that my tech-savvy son once mentioned that it is possible to hide your IP address. Fortunately, Google and company were still accessible to provide plenty of advice…

The solution: Accessing the Internet via VPN Servers

After a few hard working hours of extensive research, including the reading of dozens of forums and reviews, I ended up plumping for HideIPVPN, a VPN service which allows you to log-in to the Internet via a choice of British, American, Dutch, German, or Canadian servers.

If you would like to assist, in return we will provide you with our popular Value Betting course …absolutely free of charge!

What Exactly Do We Need?

Photo: Jason Stitt (Shutterstock)

In order to develop Soccerwidow and keep it online and growing as a quality resource, we need to drive traffic and increase our reputation and presence on the Internet.

Essentially, we are looking for links from other Web sites in order to drive new visitors to Soccerwidow. Links from other betting related blogs, forums, specific football betting related sites, tipster sites, etc…

The vital factor is that the links on these sites must be clickable (hyperlinks), embedded in suitable and encouraging text, directing either to our home page or any of our articles (deep linking).

It’s Down To You To Spread The Word

If you’ve landed on our site then you have probably already searched long and hard elsewhere on the Web for reliable explanations about bookmaker maths, football statistics and professional sports betting.

We’ve definitely made a few people happy to have found our site for the free betting tuition and advice it provides, but of course, finding such a small site as Soccerwidow is like finding a needle in a haystack; we simply do not reach as many people who would perhaps like to find us.

Therefore, in order to spread the word about Soccerwidow.com we need you to help us guide others to this site.

How Can You Do This?

Leave threads or comments in forums or other Web sites you use and recommend our site.

In your text you can either place a link directing readers of your comment to our home page;

You can also link back from your Facebook profile or other social networks, but basically the creative side is down to you. However you decide to do the job, we would like you to place a total of 15 links from different sites to Soccerwidow, and in exchange, we will send you our Value Betting course for free!

It’s a win-win situation and we think you will be pleased with the outcome.

Creative Thinking!

Are you reading an interesting article in another blog? Leave a comment there with a back link to Soccerwidow: One down, 14 to go!

Do you have a Twitter account? Have you just read a good article in Soccerwidow? Simply twitter the article telling people why you found it so useful: Two down, 13 to go!

It’s as easy as this…

However, please do not spam! Soccerwidow does not promote spam of any description and we can do without a reputation for being a spammer. This means that leaving 10 comments on the same blog or twittering 10 times will only count as one credit each towards your total of 15!

Due to continued regulatory challenges, Betfair have taken the decision to temporarily suspend their marketing programmes in Germany.

They are currently undertaking a licensing process in Germany for Sports, Games and Poker and have already been granted a Sports betting licence in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, one of 16 German states.

As it stands, they are in a promising position to become a fully licensed operator countrywide but, in order not to jeopardise their remaining applications, they have decided to pause marketing activities for new customer acquisition across all channels and products in Germany for the time being.

This affects Soccerwidow fundamentally as Betfair Germany has also suspended orders for blog articles, which includes our match previews.

Of course, “Why not continue publishing them in the Soccerwidow blog?” Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.

To write and publish a carefully researched and analysed match preview requires approximately three to four working hours; four pieces a week adds up to a considerable amount of time.

In anticipation of just such a situation, we tried a few months ago to publish match previews in Soccerwidow.com (May to July this year). These articles were immensely popular and sometimes attracted more than 1,000 readers each, but the majority came to the site purely for the picks. The increased traffic slowed down the site for genuine readers and contributed nothing in terms of additional sales (Soccerwidow’s course and spreadsheets) or numbers of clicks on ads.

Photo: Kanvag (Shutterstock)

We are sorry to disappoint any regular and loyal readers and we hope you understand our decision not to substitute the previously paid articles in Betfair with free match previews in Soccerwidow is purely about time and money. We wish we could, but we can’t.

Occasionally, readers suggest that we sell our value bet picks and recommendations as they are so successful, or at least introduce a premium service, offering match previews for a monthly subscription fee.

However, this has never been and never will be the goal of this Web site. Soccerwidow wants only to encourage anyone who wishes to bet to use their own intelligence and to fully understand odds calculation and the markets. The site is set up primarily for educational purposes.

Our main aim is education and training, not to provide an easy-to-use picks service for the public. The few match previews we published on Soccerwidow in the past were detailed analyses intending to guide readers into learning how to identify value bets for themselves. If the information we provide persuades some readers to give up betting altogether when they see how difficult it is to make money from gambling, then this is part of our ambit too.

Moreover, if we did start a premium service this would require an increased number of match previews and bet recommendations in order to diversify the betting portfolio sufficiently to ensure its long-term success. Consequently, this would generate a need to employ additional contributors, train them, add quality assurance procedures, and so on. Quite simply, this is not the direction we wish to follow.

We can only cross our fingers and hope that Betfair’s licensing procedure does not take too long. If and when the situation resolves itself, Soccerwidow’s match previews will immediately recommence.

Of course, another possibility is that an alternative solution may come up in the meantime, for example, a different publisher who needs professionally analysed, statistically based match previews.

To avoid confusion: This is about Betfair’s new customer marketing budget in Germany, not their existing German customer accounts.

Betfair states that there will be no impact on existing customers and on Betfair’s product offering. All products and Web sites, particularly www.betfair.com, will remain live and accessible for German customers without any restrictions.

The outage hit us around Monday, 9th July at 10pm and lasted until Thursday, 12th July, when the site began reappearing bit by bit at around 5pm.

67-hours total failure of our hosting service!

The only thing we could do was wait, and email out updates and apologies to the few people whose email addresses we had on record.

This has certainly taught us a few lessons:

• We are already investigating a mirror service to have Soccerwidow double hosted (or treble hosted if we can!).
• Due to the many of you who contacted us for match previews, in future we will have a subscription option to collect emails from readers so that we can keep in touch during unfortunate events like this.
• Back-ups are now being performed every 24-hours.

There is not much else we can do other than apologise. The situation was completely out of our control.

We will have to restore some lost data, and then get on with Soccerwidow’s work.

As our server firm Dreamhost were saying for 67 hours, “We apologize [sic] for the inconvenience caused by this unplanned maintenance.”

Update 14.7.2012

Both, Soccerwidow.com and Fussballwitwe.com, are back online again although still a bit slow. This is due to the fact that Dreamhost’s server is not yet back to 100%, and there are still some configuration issues with Apache.

We also had to use backup data, but unfortunately we did not back up every 24 hours meaning that our WordPress backup files were 8 days old, but the database not. This meant a lot of missing images leading to hundreds of broken links which is causing internal errors. Even the reader does not see it (except that there is no picture displayed of course), it slows down the site immensely we had to notice.

Lesson learned we will backup more frequently in future.

Fingers crossed that the site will be up and running smoothly soon again.

One observation of mine is that design plays less of a role than you would imagine. Internet users are familiar with all kinds of Web site setups, and some very successful sites don’t offer fancy designs. Just have a look at Google: personally, I wouldn’t give them any prizes for design! Therefore, a pretty layout is certainly pleasing on the eye, but it’s not the key to attracting thousands of visitors.

What guests need is user-friendly navigation to find their way through a site, especially when the article count is growing quickly. Articles obviously need to be unique, nobody likes reading the same stuff everywhere. But what came as a surprise was that short articles are perceived better than longer ones. Therefore, we have started to split relatively long articles into shorter chunks which are easier to digest.

Of course, the total number of articles matters. Soccerwidow.com now has around 140 articles in both of its languages (German and English) making a total of 280. Experience with blogging is another important factor. With time, the penny has dropped and we have begun to understand what attracts readers and what turns them off. The learning curve is steep and information overload has been a problem.

It took 18 months for Soccerwidow.com to reach 1,000 daily visitors. Hundreds of hours went into the development of this Web site. The hardest and most time-consuming task was (and still is), mastering all the technical challenges of blogging, rather than producing content for the site. Of course, the main objective of blogging is to write articles and it is very rewarding to know that people are reading and appreciating my work.

Blog maintenance, PHP programming, design, database administration eat more than half of my time at the moment. The other half is divided between odds calculation and developing/evaluating betting strategies. Only 20% of the total time available is left for writing articles. For me, this is unsatisfactory and honestly, quite unexpected.

Hopefully this pivot will change in the near future when I reach a stage where my technical blogging knowledge is so advanced that only a few hours a week need be spent on learning new skills. Currently, much time is spent reading and understanding various blogging tutorials and searching through forums to find technical solutions for the blog.


Click on to enlarge the following table:

Google Analytics – Weekly Visits: 1.1.2011 (start of blog) to 22.6.2012 (today)

If you are thinking of starting a blog from scratch, with limited resources and no real knowledge of blogging, then please be very, very patient. Your progress will undoubtedly be extremely slow.

The following figures represent Soccerwidow’s readership benchmarks:

In January 2011 (the blog’s beginnings: primordial soup!): 340 visits, 1,081 page views
In June 2011 (half-year stage): 810 visitors, 1,829 page views
In January 2012 (month 13): 4,238 visitors, 10,515 page views
In May 2012 (month 17): 13,150 visitors, 25,125 page views
1st-21st June, 2012 (last 3 weeks: after almost 18 months of blogging): 14,861 visitors, 28,972 page views

In the last few weeks Soccerwidow.com exceeded for the first time the threshold of 1,000 visitors per day. Hurray!!


Click on to enlarge the following table:

StatCounter - Daily Visitors Last 14 days: 7.6.2012 to 21.6.2012

The 21st June, 2012 (day 537 of blogging), was the first day with over 2,000 page views

I wish to thank all the loyal readers who have kept me going with their comments and input. Sometimes I felt like giving up, but kept going thanks to the encouragement of others.

Photo: Mopic (Shutterstock)

Also, many thanks to everyone who has ever pointed out technical flaws in the site and/or given tips on improving the blog. This was another important factor helping to achieve the goal of 1,000 daily readers.

However, the greatest “thank you” needs to go to my most reliable supporter, the person who never fails to believe in me, my loving husband. ‘Soccerwidow’s Bloke’ has not only helped translate and publish many articles into proper English, he has also added a flavour of subtle humour (it’s his fault if you find any grammar mistakes in this article!), and he also now writes match previews independently using the Soccerwidow statistical approach.

This is an exciting time. Soccerwidow is growing on a daily basis meaning that the actual blogging is becoming more and more rewarding.

Thank you all so much and best wishes from Soccerwidow – Hopefully this blog will be here to provide you with more valuable betting advice both now and in the foreseeable future!

Lately, regular readers may have noticed up-to-date versions of some older articles have surfaced, many of which have been split into smaller ‘chunks’, which we hope are a little easier to digest.

To those familiar with the Soccerwidow site, you may also see that the navigation and layout have changed too. Hopefully, this will have a positive effect on the reading experience and please be assured there are many more improvements to follow…

Photo: mmaxer (Shutterstock)

We have reacted to the generous feedback from many readers and to be honest, we’ve known for a while that the site was a little messy and even quite challenging to navigate. The site build was simply not intuitive enough and people subsequently became lost in a maze of random content.

Since thoughts of using recent advancements in web technology are still a little daunting for us to pilot an instant and seamless transition between the old and the new Soccerwidow format, you will experience the changes in real time and witness how the shape and ‘gestalt’ of this blog gradually evolves.

Summary of the more substantial changes to be expected:

• German and English language content will have separate domains (Fussballwitwe.com for German and Soccerwidow.com for English). The migration is likely to be done automatically by WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) but the headache will be the hundreds of outdated indexed links in Google and also the numerous Web sites which refer to Soccerwidow. It is crucial to perform this migration quickly and completely as daily new links are added.
• The home page will be re-designed in order to communicate Soccerwidow’s content and vision more clearly and help with the navigation.
• Content will be separated into ‘blogging’ pages (current news, information, blog announcements, etc.), and ‘information’ pages (mathematical articles, reviews, tutorials, etc.). The ultimate goal is to program the navigation as intuitively as possible.

However, the largest challenge is that everything is tackled with very little and limited human resources, since there is no money available to pay specialists. Some things which are probably worth no more than a glance for a professional can sometimes lead to many weeks at the coal face for us (e.g. the design!).

Soccerwidow.com has cost 15 months’ hard work but the increasing numbers of visitors make it worthwhile: more than 250 visitors performing over 600 page views on a daily basis (as at April 2012). However, the site is becoming a victim of its own success with technical problems such as slower page downloads partly due to an increasing number of background scripts.

Therefore it has become necessary to transfer this blog from the ‘personal diary’ format as it began life in January 2011, to a more professional platform. As Soccerwidow.com is still a relative newcomer to the Web, there is still a lot of work to do (and no-one to delegate to!).

Please be patient during this watershed period and thanks as always for your time and support!

Soccerwidow

However, please bear in mind that the blog has been virtually dormant for the last three months due to our return to Europe following a two-year spell in Uganda. Despite this ‘time-out’, surprisingly the stream of visitors hasn’t completely dried up, as the following graphic shows:

Visitors January to June 2011 - Soccerwidow (Google Analytics)

Up until February, the blog’s popularity grew consistently and daily, and had by March reached an average of 54 visitors per day. Three months later with literally no new content added, there are still approximately 32 daily visitors to Soccerwidow. This 31% decrease in traffic may also be due to non-functioning WordPress plugins (some software updates have not been applied), and many folk must have been frustrated by constant ‘404 error’ messages.

An entire day was spent getting the many technical problems back in order. For example, WP Link Robot switched off, and there were problems with the navigation (PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation Plugin), some of which remain unfixed. Also the WMPL Plugin (multilingual pages) provided further headaches as the WPML gurus had changed the formerly free plugin to a commercial version and unfortunately, the old version is not 100% compatible with the WordPress updates; hence the multi-language categories were showing 404 errors.

However, no Soccerwidow readers queried any faults, which is a lesson learned: A blog owner must identify any broken links and check his/her Web site regularly for performance. Because there is so much choice available on the Internet, readers are more likely to vote with their feet if a site is or becomes unreliable.

Due to the aforementioned, Soccerwidow’s Alexa page rank naturally dropped:

Alexa Page Rank as at 01.07.2011

Comparison: In March the blog had an Alexa page rank of around 254,000.

Readers and most popular topics

The German articles were viewed 71,588 times, whilst English language articles attracted 131,195 page views. The most popular article was Calculation of Odds: Probability and Deviation, viewed 5,265 times since its publication on 11.3.2011; approximately 46 times per day.

Comparison: The German version of this article Kalkulation von Wettquoten: Wahrscheinlichkeit und Abweichung, was likewise the most popular in this language. It was published on 20.2.2011, three weeks before the English translation, and has since attracted 3,182 readers, an average of 24 per day.

These are surely small numbers compared to more successful blogs but nevertheless, I find the statistics worth mentioning, particularly since there seem to be very few articles in the Internet where one can compare one’s own blog performance and start-up experience with others.

It is interesting that the English article Self check: Do I have A Gambling problem? attracted 3,205 views, placing it at number 9 out of 44 published articles, whilst the German translation: Spielercheck: Habe ich ein Spielproblem?, achieved a ranking of 35 from 52 articles. Are English language readers more concerned about their gambling habits than German speakers?

On the other hand, the German article Über Mich is at position number 18, with 1,558 visitors. The English version About Me is not so popular with only 777 visitors ranking the article 43rd most popular out of 44. The Germans seem to be more interested in the author!

A further phenomenon is that the German speakers, although accounting for 32% less page views, provide substantially more comments on the articles. Likewise the article rating system (the six stars) seems to attract substantially more interaction with the German readership. The German readers therefore represent a more tangible audience than the English, who remain curiously anonymous. This is also borne out by the poll asking whether people make money from gambling, which attracted four times as many answers from German readers than from English ones:

Umfrage: Vedienen Sie Geld mit Wetten?

Survey: Are you making money from betting?

According to the survey 15% of the blog’s German readers are non-gamblers, compared to 0% non-gamblers amongst the English fraternity. 80% of the ‘English’ also answered that they lose more than they win, compared to just under 50% of ‘German’ readers.

Altogether in six months, the blog received 4,317 unique visitors from 102 different countries, with 71 different language groups. This equated to an average of 24 new visitors per day. Over 2,000 first visitors returned to the blog at least once, representing almost half of all first visitors.

Soccerwidow: Visitors by Country (Google Analytics)

The majority of readers are based in Germany: 2,202 unique visitors, more than 50% of the entire readership. If the other German speaking countries, Switzerland and Austria, are added then the total grows to 2,435 readers, or around 56% of the total readership.

The remaining 44% of readers are distributed across 99 other countries and speak 67 different languages, the majority being from countries where English is not the native language. This may go some way to explaining why English language comments on the blog are sparse:

Soccerwidow: Visitors by Language (Google Analytics)

Income via affiliate programs and advertising

Photo: Granata1111 (Shutterstock)

Today’s article finishes with the largest disappointment. Not a penny has been earned from affiliate programs or advertising in either language! After many hours spent registering with different affiliate programs, downloading their banners and inserting them into the Web site, still no income for Soccerwidow, but plenty of free advertising for them, especially as the articles have been viewed a total of 202,735 times.

Various SEO blogs in the Internet explain that one can expect between five and eight Euros per thousand views. This would mean that with approximately 202,000 views, with three to four different adverts on each page, Soccerwidow should have received by now around 700 times say five Euros, or 3,500 Euros income. Even half of this would have been an acceptable result but, Soccerwidow’s blog finishes its first half year with ZERO commercial income.

Herewith the income table (the listing is not complete; there are approximately twice as many affiliate partners but all show zero income!):

Affiliate Statistics - January to June 2011

…and 888Sports charges $25 for a bank transfer, hence the $13.85 sitting as credit in Soccerwidow’s affiliate account will probably remain an untapped source of income for some time to come! Soccerwidow would genuinely be interested in hearing from anyone in the Internet who actually makes money with affiliate programmes…

The only real income from the blog was through sales of the article Practical Guidance to Recognizing Value Bets, which sold 13 times for 5 Euros a piece, however only in the German version and not once in English!

Therefore, for the time being Soccerwidow will remain a hobby as we doubt it will ever provide enough financial support to take on as a full-time occupation.

To close, thank you to all our readers who remained loyal and patient despite the three month sabbatical. Life is now settling down again, which should allow time to analyse some football data and get everything ready for the new European seasons. Hopefully, we will again publish regular picks and plenty more articles explaining betting maths, if only to dispel the myths surrounding gambling!

Back to: The First Month in Figures – January 2011

Back to: The Second Month in Figures – February 2011

Photo: W. Scott (Shutterstock)

The Internet contains a large amount of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) advice and articles recommending how to increase a blog’s popularity, however there isn’t much information available confirming whether it works in practice. More so, I was curious to find out how other blogs have developed from the start-up phase, but on this subject I found hardly anything, hence this update.

I would like to stress that I do not use any under-handed methods like buying back-links or traffic. The blog is growing organically through the publication of my own unique content and articles which are then listed by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Leaving comments and back-links to Soccerwidow in other blogs is also helping, but finding relevant and appropriate places in which to do this is quite challenging and time-consuming, especially in the English speaking community.

Alternatively, there are plenty of forums ready-made to receive my views and opinions but already, I have been banned from two English blogs (shortly after registering), purely because my back-links contravened their terms and conditions relating to self-advertisement. I also received a warning from a German forum and have for the time being stopped leaving back-links in any forums (this is of course contrary to all the advice I found in the Internet recommending back-links in forums in order to drive traffic!).

I am seeing quite a fight for market share in the Internet and this is definitely something I hadn’t bargained for to such an extent. This month I also received a few dubious offers by email, which were all binned straight away.

The goals for February were:

• 600 back links –> not achieved: 416 back links
• At least 100 visitors per day –> not achieved: on average approximately 50 visitors per day
• An Alexa rank under 2 million –> over-achieved: 672,683
• To increase the number of visitors from Great Britain in relation to visitors from Germany (at least 50% of the visitors should come from GB) and also increase returning visits from GB (38% of German readers return but only 8% from GB visit again). –> not achieved: The number of visitors rose but, with an even higher proportion reading German language pages
• German visitors spend on average three minutes 30 seconds reading the blog but visitors from GB only one minute and 39 seconds. The time spent by guests on the site needs to be increased: –> partly achieved: German visitors now spend four minutes, 28 seconds on the site (+27%), but the number of visitors from English-speaking countries is growing only very slowly

Visitor Statistics

The number of visitors trebled, but the time spent reading the blog and the average number of pages visited both dropped:

Visitor Statistics: Google Analytics - January 2011

Visitors Statistics: Google Analytics - February 2011

The majority of visitors currently come from Germany and this has definitely caught me by surprise. When I started out two months ago, I was expecting the majority of visitors to come from English speaking countries:

Visitors by Countries: February 2011

The following is a screenshot of the number of returning visitors (Unique IP addresses); in other words, those who came back to the site more than once:

Returning Visitors: February 2011

Soccerwidow has 112 regular readers from Germany and only 43 from the rest of the world (encompassing 28 different countries). My husband surmises that the English version of the blog is not performing so well because it has so much competition from other football related sites in the English language.

Income from Affiliate Marketing

The income from affiliate marketing was ZERO in February, despite a very good Click-Through rate:

Click-Through Rate Affiliate Programme

The above table includes only three of Soccerwidow’s 63 active affiliate programs, all three of them showing similar good click-through figures, but with the same fat zero in the end column!

Google AdSense refused my application as Soccerwidow.com links to gambling sites which offends Google’s terms and conditions. So far, the alternative Betvertiser, highly praised in the Internet, has not generated any income either.

I will continue observing this for another month and if at the end of March there is still no positive development, I will think about removing all links to gambling sites and apply again with AdSense. However, as my site is definitely gambling related I hold out little hope of being accepted, but AdSense is the only provider paying per click, of which I have many.

Update, April 2012: Google AdSense have recently changed their T’s & C’s and Google adverts are now allowed if the Web site is not an online casino or wagering site and also, does not drive organic traffic to gambling sites. Blogs about gambling, including referral links or gambling adverts are okay.

Alternative Income Sources

Since affiliate marketing (banner advertisement) does not seem to function at so early a stage in my site’s development, I need to think about alternatives. The following are a few thoughts but, I am always very open-minded and welcoming of suggestions from my readers(!):

• Set-up a paid weekly picks service
• Publish tutorial downloads for fees
• Offer paid seminars (F2F – face to face)

At this moment in time, my favourite idea is the latter and I’m thinking of offering coaching seminars in the coming summer break and possibly organising a European tour. If this idea generates any interest from likely candidates, then any income earned would allow the blog to run for free.

Income from Betting

A further alternative would be making money from betting as my approach, based on probability calculation and statistics, seems to be quite successful:

Soccerwidow's Bank in February 2011

I started with a bank of 50 € and have achieved a profit of +153% after just three weekends. However, although I am always sure that my computations are correct, I am quite risk averse. This means that I will only feel comfortable putting larger sums of money on my picks once I have checked the consistency of my computations in greater detail over many weeks, to ensure there are no mistakes in reasoning and that the past profit has indeed been no coincidence.

“Eureka” Moments

I experienced a few “Eureka” moments in February, not necessarily all positive, either things I wasn’t expecting to happen, or myths I didn’t really believe existed:

1. With a blog one cannot immediately make fast, easy money, even if the visitor numbers rise exceptionally and those visitors click on many advertising banners. Affiliate programmes do not seem to be worthwhile at all, even if many of them offer generous commissions (some as high as 30-40%). Of course, if no-one registers with these affiliate partners after clicking on my links, even an offer of 100% commission would bring no income to Soccerwidow.
2. Sites are quick in suspending accounts as soon as they think you are self-advertising on their forums, and some blog owners are not interested in co-operation; they even lock their sites to your IP address when discovering that you may have a competing interest in their site. The market share struggle makes it a dog-eat-dog environment with not many potential business partners wishing to cooperate. The Internet community seems very ‘cold’ as a result.
3. The absolute majority of visitors are passive readers and despite many regular visitors (e.g. 112 from Germany), only a handful have ever communicated with me and most seem to prefer anonymity: They are happy to vote on the betting poll I have posted on the site but resist communication by comments or email.
4. I still find it amazing how fast my Alexa rank has risen in such a short space of time and I therefore must assume that most Web sites (over 90%) have less than 50 regular visitors per day.

Problems So Far…

The topic is huge, and luckily I have hundreds of article subjects and ideas in my mind. Unfortunately, in order to maintain the quality of articles I cannot populate the site as quickly as I would like.

WPML (the WordPress Plugin for multi-languages) is not compatible with the new WordPress 3.1 version and they have stopped providing upgrades for free. This means that one must now buy a license. In view of the very few visitors from non-German speaking countries combined with zero income from the site so far, I am hesitating with this purchase, which means the English version of my blog currently has an error when visitors try to navigate using categories.

Everything else is running smoothly (touch wood!), except that I’m bashing my head against a wall trying to come up with a feasible idea how to get paid for my hard work!

The goals for March

March will hopefully see my blogging and statistical analyses translated into money. I will probably publish only part of the weekly picks free of charge and ask for a small payment for the rest.

Looking ahead to June/July, as mentioned, I’m thinking of offering seminars in the form of a ‘Summer Academy’ and offering contents such as data evaluation, odds calculation, identification of ‘value’ bets, development and assessment of strategies; the duration of these seminars would probably be one week in different cities in Germany and Europe.

I have to assume that the number of visitors will continue to rise constantly and organically, and hope that my readers spread the word of Soccerwidow’s existence.

If all else fails and my effort to earn money via blogging comes to nothing, I still have the option of selling Soccerwidow.com in Ebay: The value of this blog (as at the end of February) is $3,714.19 USD, tendency rising: Sitetrail

Naturally, I hope I will not have to sell Soccerwidow, but instead as suggested in my opening salvo, Hello football widows and football widowers (article is in German!), will succeed in making a living from the thousands of professional soccer games played each month and in general from the worldwide enthusiasm for the sport.

The blog is still in its experimental phase and the primary goal is to make money from the site, ideally without having to bet myself. Paradoxically, however, it seems that betting myself might actually bring the most profit: Starting bank on 12.2.: 50 € – February: 126 € – Estimate for March: 360 € – Estimate for April: 800 €, and if my statistical approach continues to make a profit of 30% every week, at the end of the year, who knows?!

Many thanks to all my regular readers, but the largest “thank you” to those who have helped me with their comments and votes, those who keep me ‘on the ball’ and motivated. Play to the final whistle, as they say!

Back to: The First Month in Figures – January 2011

Forward to: The First Half Year in Figures – Jan-Jun 2011

In summary, I published a total of 24 articles, each in English and German, achieving an average of nearly one bilingual post per day.

However, I have to say it was fairly difficult, working solidly throughout the daylight hours. Thankfully, motivation was constantly at hand seeing the number of visitors rising slowly, but steadily:

Visitors Per Day

Altogether, the blog attracted 249 unique visitors, of which 49.85% left the site immediately they landed upon it (the bounce rate), but the remainder stayed for an average of five minutes and 16 seconds:

Google Analytics as at 31.1.2011

A closer view shows that 96 first-time visitors (39.8%) returned to the site to read more, staying for an average of 18 minutes and 22 seconds:

New Visitors vs. Returning Visitors

In just one month, Soccerwidow achieved an Alexa page rank of 4,264,036 (not bad considering that there are approximately 255,000,000 websites worldwide); Google indexed 96 links and Yahoo 31, and by the end of January, there were also 285 back-links to Soccerwidow:

Site-trail Statistics 31.1.2011

Visitors googled various keywords and found Soccerwidow via the following words and phrases:

Search Engine Keywords 31.1.2011

Nevertheless, visitors did not click on as many adverts as hoped (literally zero income), which means I may take out the banners and leave only the text links. More lucrative income streams will have to be sought.

Clicks in the First Month - 31.1.2011

Unfortunately, there were hardly any comments placed on the site by readers in January. This is regrettable as feedback is enormously important for me in order to adjust the content and type of articles to my readers’ tastes. It is also important for my own motivation as it is quite challenging to write ‘in the dark’ and then only see afterwards the growing numbers of visitors reading the articles, being the only measure of how successful each has been.

However, there was one enquiry by email whether I can deliver paid football tips and prognoses on the English Premier League. I will think about this and perhaps introduce a paid newsletter service?

Visitors by Country

The targets for February are:

• 600 back-links to Soccerwidow
• At least 100 visitors per day
• An Alexa rank of under 2 million
• To increase the number of visitors from Great Britain in relation to German visitors (at least 50% of visitors should come from GB?) and also increase returning visits from GB (38% of German readers come back again but only 8% from GB do so).
• German visitors spend on average three minutes and 30 seconds per visit, but British visitors only one minute 39 seconds. Altogether, the time spent by guests on the site needs to increase to make it worthwhile continuing with the blog.

The most popular articles in January were:

• Football Mania in Uganda
• HT/FT – Betting on equally matched teams – Evaluation
• Review and Tips: MarketFeeder Pro – Betfair Bot
• The Method of Matched Betting
• Guest Authors

Photo: Gibsons (Shutterstock)

The article MarketFeeder was published only yesterday (31st January), and has already reached 28 readers. Therefore, I will publish more reviews of betting ‘bots’ in February. 17 visitors (7% all visitors) were interested in the article Guest Authors, meaning there are probably good chances that people may perhaps write for the blog sometime in the future?

So, that’s it for this month. I think Soccerwidow has got off to quite a good start and it remains for me to hope that the trend continues. In the meantime, thank you all for your time and support!

If you are interested in Soccerwidow’s historical development, why not have a look at the following month’s figures for Month 2 – February 2011