Creating a Free Web Presence for your Club

Many people are talking about Web Presence and Social Media these days but what does that mean and how can you do it on the cheap?

What is Web Presence?

Wikipedia defines web presence as "the number of internet locations where information about a specific brand, company, entity or individual can be located". This is important in so many ways! The internet is the one place you can have a club available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you don't need to go down to the clubhouse and open your doors!

Having a good web presence helps you to find more people:

• more members
• more athletes
• more spectators
• more volunteers
• more sponsorship

It is the best way for your community to find you, any time day or night.

There are many ways to build your web presence for your club, but it doesn't have to cost the earth (or in many cases anything at all).

• Create a website using one of the many free tools around, we will help show you which ones are good.
• Get on Facebook and Twitter, build up a profile for your club (add these links to your profile on OnlySport.org as well).
• Plug in some free metrics and analytics to show you how great your presence is doing.
• Jump on OnlySport.org and add your club today.

Creating a Website - Why?

There are many options out there in the internet world from spending nothing (that is correct, free) to spending thousands and thousands! But today we are talking about the cheap options.

Blogger.com is what this blog has started on and it is a great blogging platform! Though it can be used for great simple websites also.

Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Do these things make you worried? Don't be, they're great services for connecting with your community and if used correctly can greatly increase your ability to communicate!

Why are Metrics (or Analytics) important?

There is no point doing any of this if you cannot see or measure the impact it has on your club. Did you get a new member because of the post you made in Facebook? Where did all the spectators come from? What brought them to you?

Metrics will help you answer these questions and to be honest it is just fun to see how many people interacted with your club today!

Google Analytics is a great free platform for anyone getting started, of course services like Facebook provide a small amount of metrics also (they call it insights).

Some not so free (but still cheap) things to do

There are many things you can spend money on but a few have a bigger impact than you may think...

Domain Names

Buying a domain name for your club is one of the best things you can do. A major appeal is it provides people visiting your website with more trust, as it feels like you care more about your presence.

Domain names come with an even more important reason: No matter what technology you choose, where you host your website or who looks after your email, if you have your own domain name you can change providers in very little time bringing your traffic with you - no more "this website has moved, please go here" pages which leave a stale taste. This is absolutely worth the small yearly cost of having your own domain name.

OnlySport.org, we are here to help!

We have created OnlySport.org to provide services and advice to anyone in the sporting community. This blog is only the beginning of many services we will be creating throughout the project.

Head on over and add your club to OnlySport.org today, we are more than happy to send people your way!

Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to keep updated with what we are doing.

And more importantly, chat with us - tell us how we could help you - the more people asking us for help the more we can help the community!