There’s so much money in sports today. Famed basketball icon, Lebron James, is purported to earn a whopping $ 44 million from his deal with the Lakers this season. Aside from established athletes, sports enthusiasts are cashing in on their love for sports by staking on a decentralized betting platform like Bookmaker. XYZ on their favorite fixtures. Indeed, contemporary sports provide an excellent opportunity to make a lucrative living, especially on social media. You can earn an envious income and live a beautiful lifestyle if you build a robust social media following around your favorite sport. How do you do this?
First, pick a sports niche
If you are serious about building a massive social media following as a sports influencer, then you must build it around a game that you love and enjoy. Passion is important because, at first, you may not be immediately financially rewarded. So at least enjoy what you do to derive that emotional energy to be consistent at the early stage, even with sparse monetary motivation. It is preferable to pick a game that you have reasonable mastery or knowledge of if you want to promote your authority and influence, building a loyal social media audience as a sports influencer. You at least need to show the people you bring on that you can entertain, educate or provide value for them in your chosen spots.
Consistently push out exciting sports content
Social media is about entertainment, fun, and liveliness. If you want to speedily build a social media following as a sports authority, you need to consistently put out top-notch content optimized around the spots you love. Consistency gives your social media audience something savory to always come for or look forward to. Social media success doesn’t happen spontaneously. At the very beginning, you might not get exponential rewards for the efforts you’ve put in. If you have to take the organic route and build your social media following as a sports influencer organically without paid ads, you may not see substantial growth until the fourth to sixth month. Yet, you need to be consistent up till then. Nobody builds a robust social media following overnight. It takes time and commitment to constantly entertain your audience with exhilarating sports content. When your audience trusts you for something fun and entertaining, they will regularly check up on your page and actually refer their friends. This gives you an amplified opportunity to expand and broaden your reach
Interacts with your audience
Social media is a two-way game. You produce sports content to attract people. The sports enthusiasts to derive from those contents must be sustainably engaged on your platform. This means constantly replying to their queries and trying to show and represent yourself actively in communications relating to you and your page. Fundamentally, you don’t just want to be a lifeless brand posting on social media or not caring about what your audience has to say. Did you put out a sports video that your audience really loved? Did they comment on it? If yes, reply to these comments as much as you can. Did they suggest improvements? If yes, show an inclination towards integrating their inputs. Overall, you want to persistently engage with your social media audience when building a robust sports following.
Build relationships with influencers
In the social media sports world, there are established icons like Patricia Morris and Griffin. You can actually leverage it to amplify your reach. There are lots of sports influencers ranging from freestylers to athletes with that you can invest in building genuine relationships with these people are open to giving you a shout-out on their page, giving you massive visibility to 1000s or possibly millions of their followers. Preferably you want to help these influencers help you. That means you want to prove your credibility and not for them to trust you enough to introduce you to the audience. Also, you want to help the bigger influencer also amplify his message and popularity. This way, it’s a win-win when they promote you.
Look out for sponsorships
After sustainably building your following on social media, it may be time to cash in and commercialize your audience. At this point, you can actually look at sponsorships from brands that possibly are targeting your audience. These brands, if proven that you have impressive engagement rates, are open to engaging you as a sports influencer or at least trying to tie into your influence and attract your audience. Of course, these brands want to sell and are willing to pay you well to promote them. But more importantly, you should be concerned about the quality of what they are selling. Remember, your social media followers are more like your community and your brethren. You only want to refer them to something quality, not just any shady brand willing to pay you. So when vetting brands to reach out to for sponsorship deals as a sports influencer, you must investigate the genuineness of the service or product they are offering your audience
Build an email list from your audience
Lastly, you can build an email list from your social media following. In the world of social media, things change rapidly. Your page can get shut down or hacked, and you may lose your audience. One smart way to hedge against this misfortune is by building an email list. Here, committed members of your community can actually subscribe to receive newsletters from you. This gives you an additional platform to engage them aside from social media. Periodically, when you release sports content or you have products to introduce them to, you can send them an email campaign. Being that they already trust you from your engagement with them on social media, this sports audience is more likely to take action and buy into what you promote or sell.You will agree this is an excellent opportunity to make earn heavily, ethically, and sustainably from your social media following.
