Nonetheless, Soccerwidow still receives a considerable number of direct visits, which means our loyal readers continue to check for updates and new content.

This article is for you, our dedicated supporters.
 

A New Chapter Begins

We are thrilled to announce the revamping of our website and the launch of a new subdomain: shop.soccerwidow.com. The Soccerwidow team has been hard at work to make this new space more user-friendly, visually appealing, and organized for our loyal readers.

We listened to your feedback and implemented changes to improve navigation and give the site a fresh look. We believe you’ll find our revamped store a more enjoyable and efficient shopping experience.
 

Explore Our Enhanced Shop

As you explore shop.soccerwidow.com, you’ll discover our carefully curated selection of products designed to support your sports betting journey.

Whether you’re a seasoned bettor or just starting out, our range of resources is tailored to help you develop your skills and make informed decisions. We’re committed to continuously enhancing our offerings and providing exceptional value to our readers.
 

 
 

Shape the Future of Soccerwidow

With the launch of our revamped store, we want to make sure we continue to meet and exceed the expectations of our dedicated readers. That’s why we’re eager to hear your feedback about the new shop and any suggestions for how Soccerwidow can develop in the future.

Our aim is to create an experience tailored to your needs and interests, and your input is invaluable in achieving that goal.

As a token of our appreciation, we’re excited to offer our readers an exclusive opportunity.

During this event, we’ll discuss the future of Soccerwidow, unveil exciting updates, and engage in a live Q&A session with our team.

This event is our way of showing appreciation for your continued support and giving you a unique opportunity to shape the future of Soccerwidow.
 

Our Humble Beginnings and the Path Forward

It’s been over a decade since Soccerwidow was born out of the personal football frustration of its founder. Soccerwidow’s Bloke, her husband, spent the entirety of 2010 glued to the TV watching English football, even while they lived in the beautiful, adventure-filled Uganda. This experience in Uganda inspired Soccerwidow to create the Soccerwidow blog, with a mission to make football matches less exciting for her husband through accurate analyses and predictions.

That was the past…

Soccerwidow has since evolved into a platform that empowers bettors worldwide through education, resources, and tools.

Soccerwidow is a mission to demystify bookmaker maths and revolutionise sports betting education. We strongly believe that the more informed bettors become, the fewer gambling-addicted individuals there will be in the world.
 

 
 

By providing comprehensive knowledge and insights, we aim to help bettors make more informed decisions and, ultimately, minimise the risks associated with gambling. When bettors understand the underlying mechanics of sports betting, they can approach it more strategically, reducing the likelihood of developing unhealthy gambling habits.

Soccerwidow’s goal is to foster a community of responsible, well-informed bettors who can enjoy the excitement of sports betting without falling into the trap of addiction.
 

Thank You for Your Support

Your support has been the driving force behind Soccerwidow’s success, and we can’t thank you enough for sticking with us through thick and thin. We hope you enjoy exploring the new shop at shop.soccerwidow.com and attending our exclusive online event. We look forward to hearing your feedback and suggestions and are eager to continue learning and growing with you.

Together, let’s embark on this exciting journey to shape the future of Soccerwidow and redefine sports betting education. We’re confident that, with your help, we’ll achieve new heights. Don’t forget to leave a comment on this article to secure your invitation to our exclusive online event.
 

A Sneak Peek at the Exclusive Online Event

During the online event, you can expect to:

1. Gain insights into upcoming features and improvements on the Soccerwidow platform.
2. Learn about our new educational initiatives and how they will benefit you in your sports betting journey.
3. Have a chance to ask questions and provide feedback directly to the Soccerwidow team.
4. Network with fellow sports betting enthusiasts and share your experiences, tips, and strategies.
5. Participate in exclusive giveaways and contests for event attendees.

We can’t wait to share these exciting updates with you and hear your thoughts on the future of Soccerwidow.

Remember to leave a comment on this article to secure your invitation to this exclusive event. See you there!

Image: Lightspring (Shutterstock)

Although you may ask why you should hide your IP address if you are not performing anything illegal, there are times when being invisible on the net is truly essential. It is not only prudent to surf with complete privacy, but disguising your IP address of origin often helps bypass local restrictions.

Securing your identity also extends to the question of which postal address to use. For example, you may need a snail mail address that is different from your real location.

This article describes two totally legal solutions for hiding your true identity on the net and beyond…

Tip # 1: Hide your IP Address

Surfing the internet can sometimes feel like swimming in shark infested waters. Sadly, a certain percentage of the net is populated with shady people, scammers and hackers, who monitor online activities and steal personal information such as credit card PIN and account details.

In the fight against hackers, and for the protection of privacy, VPN (Virtual Private Network) services are mushrooming. Their sole purpose is to effectively disguise or hide IP addresses to make the global network more secure and to protect identities.

However, hiding your own IP is not only good for privacy. You can certainly deliberately use “hide IP” services to disguise your location and gain access to content or services which are otherwise blocked from your own country.

For example, if you want to watch a certain football match not licensed for broadcast where you are, how about utilising an IP address that is acceptable in that country?

If you cherish or rely on a service you cannot access from your own IP address then simply register with a VPN provider who will route you in to your targeted website from whichever country you choose. Absolutely easy!

VPN servers cost money to buy and run; programmers cost more on top. But you will be pleased to know that a professional VPN service with unlimited amount of transfer and encrypted VPN technology costs as little as £3.99 per month, with a choice of different VPN gateways from various countries. It is then up to you to decide if you want to come across as a surfer from the UK, from Spain, or from any other country.

Check this VPN service out – we have used them for three years and highly recommend them for everything described above. Being perpetual travellers, we constantly need to research betting exchanges and other bookmaker accounts, which are sometimes restricted in various territories we visit: HideIPVPN.

Tip # 2: Use the Services of a “Virtual” Office

If you need to have your business address in the ‘right’ area, perhaps even with a local telephone phone number to use from wherever you are, a virtual office service can make a big difference to your trading capabilities.

Perhaps you are constantly travelling but need a permanent base, someone reliable to receive mail and send it out for you; to sign for registered deliveries; to scan and forward documents to you, either by email or to an agreed postal address?

If you want, you can arrange for a “virtual” telephone line, which will be constantly monitored and calls answered in a professional manner in yours or your firm’s name by a competent secretary. If you need a manual fax sent, just email it to them – they will print it out and send it for you.

However, virtual offices are not only interesting for business customers – they work perfectly well for everyone, however large or small the need, and the comforting fact is that they are totally legal!

In the UK, for example, for an annual charge of around £120, you can have a virtual office take charge of whatever affairs you entrust them with.

Having the right location is especially handy if you need proof of address for any service provider, for whom your latest bank statement is often acceptable. Just ask your bank to change the correspondence address on your account to match that of your virtual office (or home).

Tip: Most countries in the world are satisfied for ID purposes with the address appearing on bank statements. Sometimes, companies send a confirmation letter to the address on their books enclosing a verification code, which has to be called in by phone or, is needed to complete an online registration. This is sufficient ID proof in most cases. After all, wherever you receive mail, you can be reached. Whether you really live at this address or not, is not important.

Of course, virtual offices are in business all over the world. They are not limited to your own country. You can live for example in Spain and have a business or personal address in the Netherlands. Why not? Take it from us, it works just fine!

Just google: virtual office uk

The images we use for illustration purposes throughout this website are often stock photos, purchased from outstanding libraries such as Shutterstock.

Image: alexkatkov (Shutterstock)

We sometimes modify these images and/or combine them to visualise messages, and it is then that they become our own “derivative” works.

Only where our visualisations are significantly different to the originals does our derivative work become subject to copyright itself. You will then need our permission to use any of these illustrations.

Otherwise, should you wish to use any of the images displayed on this website in your project(s) then you will need to purchase the image and its rights from the respective legal owner.

Our licences permit us to use images for our own projects, which includes the display on our sites, as well as modifications, but the artists and/or the stock photo providers continue to own the original images.

For example, the featured image for this post is owned by Shutterstock contributor ‘alexkatkov’. (The young lady opening the empty wallet).

We have purchased this image and used it to illustrate our content but, by doing so, the image does not by default become public property for everybody else to use for free.

Four Different Examples of Image Rights…

(1) The Stock Photo Provider and/or the Artist clearly own the Image

The following image is an unadulterated Shutterstock photo and you do not need to obtain permission from us to use it. Instead, you will need to visit Shutterstock (just follow the link in the byline displayed under the image) and purchase this stock photo yourself:

Image: Luis Louro (Shutterstock)

Of course, we are always happy to be mentioned as the source of your idea, but legally this is not required.

(2) Soccerwidow owns the Rights for the Derivative Work but not for the Image

Below is a quotation illustrated by a Shutterstock image:

Image: Stephane Bidouze (Shutterstock)

The image can easily be cut away from the quote and used on its own. Again, you will need to purchase the image rights from Shutterstock should you wish to use this photo.

However, if you choose to use the full visualisation of the quote then in certain circumstances obtaining permission from us alone should be enough. We have given the image a ‘new spin’ by combining it with a quote; the resultant work is deemed to be an “original work of authorship”, and therefore Soccerwidow owns the copyright.

Nevertheless, in cases like this, proper linking to us and recognition of our authorship, as well as referencing to the particular Shutterstock image(s) from your site, will be required to acknowledge the artist(s) concerned.

(3) Soccerwidow owns the sole Rights for the Derivative Work

Below, to visualise a famous quote, we have used a combination of two Shutterstock photos:

Collage of Shutterstock images; Foreground: Warren Goldswain, Background: Sam.C

This collage is therefore our own derivative work, for which we hold the intellectual design copyright, but again I stress that we do not own the images.

If you wish to use the underlying images for your own creative project then you will need to purchase them from Shutterstock.

However, if you only wish to use the collage, then obtaining permission from us will be enough.

(4) We (Soccerwidow) own the Full Rights

The following illustration employs just one of our own personal photographs.

We hold the full intellectual rights for the photo as well as the visualisation of the quote. Only our permission is required to use pictures of this nature:

Photo: Elena Schälike (Soccerwidow)

How to get our Permission

1. Please email (support[at]soccerwidow[dot]com) your request to us and provide a link to the sub-page where you found the image; if the page contains more than one visualisation then please describe which you are referring to
2. Send us a link to the website where you wish to use the illustration
3. If you intend to use our work in connection with a new article you have not yet written, then briefly describe in which context our picture will be used
4. We will consider your request and usually reply to you (including byline code) within 24 hours
5. That’s it. We do not charge for access to our own works, but depending on which visualisation you are intending to use, a Shutterstock licence purchase may be necessary. However, don’t worry about this yet. We will communicate this to you in our reply email.

Unfortunately, this is a manual procedure at the time of writing. We are using hundreds of different pictures and visualisations on the site and each requires different byline coding if used somewhere else.

Why Obtaining Our Permission is Necessary

The examples we have outlined above are not exhaustive.

Whether you need just to obtain permission from us to use a particular illustration from this site, or purchase the actual copyright licence for it from the provider, depends on the individual circumstances of each image and/or visualisation, as well as the licence terms and conditions for the underlying image(s).

Pictures used without permission violate international copyrights, not only Soccerwidow’s rights, but also the rights of the stock photo providers and/or artist(s) involved.

Uploading our images to your website using a method called “hotlinking” (calling the image direct from our server) is bandwidth theft, which is a serious crime!

Therefore, please play fair and contact us to obtain permission to use a picture. We will send you detailed information on how to implement it together with all the necessary byline and link codes.

Permission from Us is Free of Charge!

We will not charge you for our work, whether you are interested in our own photographs or, in any derivative work we have created based on photos we have the rights to use.

Copyright & Licence Issues

For your own protection, please note that no licence we have purchased will extend to cover you if you choose to copy and display images from our site without proper permission or, acquiring your own user licence.

Without any doubt, your website is not owned by us and can never legally be covered by any of our licences. We cannot be held responsible if any stock photo provider or artist decides to legally enforce their rights against you.

Therefore, in addition to linking back to us as the source of the visualisation where necessary, in many cases (e.g. example number (2) above), you may also need to purchase the image rights from the stock photo provider, for example, Shutterstock, and obtain your own licence for that particular image.

I must stress that it is absolutely crucial to ensure that you have full rights to use an image before displaying it on your site. This applies not only to our illustrations, or stock photos in general, but to every single image you include within your own website.

Further Reading on Image Licencing

Thank you for your understanding and helping to make the Internet a more fair and transparent place. After all, the Internet is all about sharing information and helping one another. By referencing to each other’s work, legality is maintained and the time, effort and creativity of contributors is fully recognised and compensated.

We are all very grateful to have the Internet around. There is a multitude of talented people who produce great images for websites and, like you and I, these people also have to pay their bills. Please respect their image rights.

Read more…

UK Copyright Law on Derivative Work
US Copyright Law in Derivative Works and Compilations

What is Alexa Ranking? How Important is it?

In order to compare websites and evaluate their popularity there are several tools on the Internet which generate comparison information. One of the most well-known is Alexa Rank.

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon, and delivers a ranking indicator about the traffic of a website.

The smaller the ranking, the more popular the website, and the greater number of visitors (so is the common belief).

This sort of information is of vital importance for both webmasters (to judge the efficacy of their own site), and for promoters (to judge which sites to spend money on advertising their own products).

However, an “indicator“, by definition, is nothing more than a ‘pointing or directing device’ without any quantitative declaration. In other words, it has little concrete meaning or application.

Alexa itself says that sites ranked 100,000+ may be subject to large ranking swings due to the scarcity of data for those sites, and yet advertising agencies place enormous importance on the Alexa ranking of websites they are trying to judge.

You will even find that most Internet Service Providers offering website reviews factor in Alexa Rank as a relevant criterion.

Alexa ranking is actually only relevant for the top 100,000 (0.33%) of the 30 million websites worldwide it monitors, and Alexa itself states that ranking for sites with relatively low traffic are subject to greater volatility.

This of course also applies to Alexa’s estimates of visitor numbers, site usage, demographics and country popularity.

Nevertheless, Alexa ranking is highly valued throughout the Internet and it seems that a massive number of marketers rely solely on the information displayed by Alexa, making sales decisions based upon what is essentially just educated guesswork.

Why is Alexa is not Accurate?

Alexa’s traffic estimates are based on Alexa toolbar users. If you take the time to read Alexa’s help pages then you will find it is clearly stated that “there may not be sufficient data from a particular country, because there are not enough toolbar users who visit the site”.

Translated into layman’s language, Alexa can only capture data about a website if its visitors have the Alexa toolbar installed in the browser they are using to view that site.

Furthermore, it must also be noted that the toolbar currently only tracks visits by just three selected browsers: Internet-Explorer, Google Chrome, and Firefox. Users of other browsers or mobile devices are not counted; Alexa simply has no way of counting them.

To reiterate, what you can see using Alexa ranking data and visitor estimates is the data generated from visitors who have an Alexa toolbar, and nothing else! And this is the case especially for webmasters and website developers who install the toolbar in their browsers.

Google Analytics – Soccerwidow/ Fussballwitwe users’ browser breakdown from 25.07.2013 to 25.10.2013 (three months)

The screenshot on the right shows the real browser distribution of Soccerwidow/ Fussballwitwe visitors over the last three months.

25.19% of all visitors used the Safari browser, which is especially popular in the United States.

Therefore, a quarter of our entire visitors are simply not detected by Alexa as there is no toolbar for Safari.

For a site the size of Soccerwidow/ Fussballwitwe, this is not an inconsequential factor and some 30,000 unique visits were therefore not captured by Alexa during the last three months.

Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Firefox users, and only if they have the Alexa toolbar installed, are the sole visitors counted towards Alexa rank and traffic estimations.

Chrome is especially popular in India and the Philippines, whilst both Firefox and Internet Explorer are widely used in Germany.

As Soccerwidow.com is addressing an international audience, these issues inevitably lead to completely misleading Alexa estimates of visitor behaviour, and despite this irrationality (probably being the case for most websites on the Net), it is still extremely important for any site to have a good Alexa rank.

Concrete information about website traffic, visitor numbers, and page views is also particularly interesting for agencies that search the Internet for advertising partners and targeted traffic.

Of course, there are also plenty of competing sites wishing to research (or to spy on) their competitors.

Lastly, there are the users of websites who maybe curious as to how popular their favourite websites actually are.

Determining how much Traffic a Website has

The first group – operators of websites – can find out their visitor numbers very easily. All it takes is a quick install of a statistical service such as Google Analytics to provide instantly ready and reliable data.

The other groups – advertisers, competitors, and readers – are left in the dark, and have limited tools at their disposal to obtain traffic information.

Unfortunately, it does not matter which evaluation tool you use (e.g. Alexa, Compete, QuantCast, etc.), the generated estimates are massively inaccurate.

Sometimes (but rarely) the results may be close, but on the whole there is no accurate data gathering method possible to correctly determine the site statistics of a third party website.

Therefore, advertisers, competitors and readers have only two options available to get reliable website traffic data.

Either they enquire directly from the website operator asking for visitor numbers and other site traffic stats they are interested in, or they can hope that the site owner publishes website traffic reports from time to time.

However, for a website owner this type of publication is very time consuming.

Of course, in deciding whether or not to publish ‘sensitive’ data about his website, the owner must also consider trading competition from other websites. After years of trial, error, and hard work, it is understandable that many website owners prefer to keep the statistics of their own success to themselves.

Nevertheless when running a website it is very important to have benchmarks for website traffic against which to compare your own efforts. Indeed, finding such information which has been freely published is the sign of a good website, confident with their own product.

Today therefore, after 2 years and 10 months of running Soccerwidow (English language version) in tandem with Fussballwitwe (German language version), here are our most up-to-date website traffic statistics.

Website Traffic Statistics – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe

Note: The published stats we refer to are always the combination of figures from both sites.

WordPress Site Stats Combined Page Views per month – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe – April 2011 to September 2013

The above screenshot is from WordPress.com Stats and shows the monthly page views.

Google Analytics also generates a similar graph and shown below are the weekly numbers of unique visitors for both sites combined:

Google Analytics Combined Visitor Overview – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe – 01.01.2011 to 19.10.2013

Interpretation

In September 2013, Soccerwidow’s and Fussballwitwe’s popularity was consistent at around 10,000 unique visitors per week, and both sites combined achieved a total of 124,200 page views in this one month.

Euro 2012 Blip

The peak in visitor numbers visible around June/July 2012 coincided with our decision to publish match previews in conjunction with the Euro 2012 football tournament articles we were contracted to write for the Betfair German language blog.

We translated our predictions for Euro 2012 into English and published them simultaneously in Soccerwidow.com.

The result was staggering as the match previews and value bet predictions were an instant hit with our readers but, the price of this success was the eventual failure of our server, which couldn’t cope with the huge influx in traffic.

The picks were enormously accurate and combined with the betting interest generated by Euro 2012, every match we previewed was called upon more than 2,000 times within a few hours of publication.

Thousands of enthusiastic punters were following our free tips, but personally speaking, we did not make a penny from this work, instead learning a very valuable lesson when our server reached its capacity limit and crashed.

As a result, we had to make a business decision and suspended the publication of free picks after the tournament finished. Of course, with no free picks and no major football tournament to fuel gambling interest, our site visitor numbers collapsed in a short space of time by the end of July 2012.

To reiterate, Soccerwidow is not a tipster service, and we have NO (!) intention of becoming one. We explain how to analyse data, what you need to know about betting, and how to calculate odds, recognise value and develop your own successful strategy.

Selecting your betting strategy and picking bets for each individual game is your job!

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…

Photo: u.g. boy (Skyscrapercity)

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.

Arsenal is apparently the most popular EPL 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, EPL 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.

Photo: u.g. boy (Skyscrapercity)

On a Saturday afternoon, up to three EPL 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.

Ugandan league games are seldom shown even on the local UBC (Uganda Broadcasting Company) networks, but there is intense support for the national team, which is currently managed by a Scotsman, Bobby Williamson.

If the national side is playing an international match not too far away from home, there is a tribal away support that travels to watch the game.

Recently, Uganda played Kenya in Nairobi and the border was absolutely clogged for a couple of days with people trying to get into and then back out of Kenya.

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.

Once I had made up my mind that this was the solution to my problem it was totally painless and quick to set up. The result is that I am now no longer surfing the Internet with a Spanish IP address from Tenerife but, with one from London. Classy, isn’t it?

The registration and setup was straight forward and easy. It really didn’t take too long. The Web site of the provider is very clearly structured and everything is explained in a foolproof manner and in great detail for technical VPN newbies like myself with pictures guiding you into understanding their well presented step-by-step instructions.

Born out of necessity, I found a service which I will certainly stick to in the future. For there are so many advantages that I was not even aware of…

Overcoming Security Issues when Connecting to Free Wi-Fi

Such an IP address disguise is effectively an additional layer of protection from hackers and spyware, especially if you log-on to the Internet via unprotected wireless connections, found in such public places as hotels or hotspots.

Sometimes you may arrive at an “unsafe” place without ever knowing about it. Hackers, thieves, scammers, etc. are waiting 24/7 for you to connect to the internet in order to attack. Perhaps you click on the wrong icon, log-in to your bank from a wrong hotspot, put a comment somewhere that you should have avoided… and suddenly you may be in big trouble!

There is also another advantage to choosing VPN as it may even save you money. Why?

Image: kanvag (Shutterstock)

Due to continued regulatory challenges, Betfair have taken the decision to 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.

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.

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.

Image: 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!

Google Adsense Algorithm: Abuse Protection

Google has a built-in algorithm which tries to optimise adverts on your site.

It also checks the behaviour of your clients who must demonstrate a click pattern showing a positive response to your adverts; clicking on or buying from the adverts themselves, or continuing their progress in the Net for answers to their keyword searches (i.e. the adverts appearing in your article were relevant to their original search).

Image: F.Schmidt (Shutterstock)

This algorithm is mainly designed to protect Adsense from abuse, such as click bombing: people who maliciously click on Google adverts appearing on a Web page with the sole aim of discrediting the affected site with Google.

This is not a joke and indeed there is murderous intent and severe competition of this nature on the Internet!

Of course, Google has an obligation to do everything possible to protect its advertisers. No advertiser wants to pay for clicks that are generated by abuse. Nobody likes receiving invoices for services which weren’t in fact rendered.

How exactly this algorithm works is a closely guarded secret at Google.

One observation is that Google records the time between the click on an advert and the return of the user to the original page.

It appears that clicks are not paid if the user returns within a ‘certain period of time’ to the Web site of origin. In other words, someone reads an article featuring an interesting advert, clicks on it, but does not remain on the advertiser’s Web site for long enough but returns to the original article/blog.

It is unknown how long the ‘certain period of time’ is.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

CTR expresses the number of clicked ads in relation to 1,000 page views.

Soccerwidow.com displays 2-3 Google ads per article and as at June 2012, daily visitor numbers are between 800-1200 meaning approximately 5,000 Google Adsense ads are being displayed daily.

This number of visitors is significant enough to evaluate experiments with variables such as ad positioning, ad size, colours, etc.

In various SEO forums a click-through rate (CTR) of 5 to 10% is discussed, meaning that there are Web sites in existence which definitely attain 50-100 paid clicks per 1,000 visitors.

Yesterday, 17.6.12, Soccerwidow.com counted over 1,000 visitors, and a 5-10% CTR would have meant 50-100 clicks. In reality, however, only 30 clicks were counted, and of these only 6 were paid (corresponding to a CTR of 0.6%).

We received readers who were clicking on more than one ad (on different articles, reasonable time intervals between clicks, and definitely no click bombing!), but many returned to the Soccerwidow site within a short time.

Aside from the fact that perhaps some of the clicks came from countries which have no monetary value for Google and their customers, a total of 24 from 30 clicks were not counted and therefore not paid. This is a considerable number.

Click farms are the winners!

The Google algorithm meant to protect against abuse, turns out in reality to curtail the progress of quality content sites and instead rewards Web sites with no real content.

Our impression is that profiteers of this algorithm are sites built with the sole purpose to lure readers via SEO optimisation and then present them with optimised sale content, persuading them to click on the ads. The user forgets the origin of their clicks, and will probably never visit this site again, but the site doesn’t care as there are plenty more fish in the ocean…

In fact, Google tries to distance themselves from these click farms, but it still seems to be the case that content-rich pages are disadvantaged against sites with no content.

The paradox of the situation

It is well accepted that advertising is a major source of revenue to websites. It is probably also indisputable that there is plenty of useless information to be found on the Internet, and readers are looking for unique and content-rich web sites.

However, the paradox of this situation is that one seems to exclude the other. Either the website has content, and then hardly any advertising revenue, or vice versa.

Google prohibits you from ‘persuading’ your readers to click on your ads. Your site may not, for example, have an arrow on screen pointing to an ad with a caption saying “Please click!“, or other similar methods of ‘pressure selling’ to readers. Adsense also prohibits themes and texts above or below ads such as, “Your click helps finance this site“.

We are wondering whether it is against Adsense policy to display a text saying, “If you click this ad, please do not under any circumstances return to this Web site!” ???

Have other Webmasters had similar experiences with Google Adsense? Any feedback would be very much appreciated…

Thanks for reading!