A call to advertisers, sponsors and BPSN supporters
Bill Potrecz and Bernie Puchalski show off the fruits of BPSN’s marketing and promotions budget. BPSN has its advertising packages ready to go.
The creation of BP Sports Niagara has been a year-long process that started last May when Bernie Puchalski and Bill Potrecz met for three days to hammer out the idea for a local sports website.
There were seminars taken at the Enterprise Centre to learn about starting and running a small business. There was the purchase of computers and camera equipment to enable us to write stories and take photos. Finally, there was the search for a local web designer to take our vision and make it a reality.
Working through the challenges of pioneering a new concept in local sports reporting, BP Sports Niagara launched in mid-September with little to no fanfare. We realized it would be difficult to attract sponsors and advertisers to a concept and decided we would spend several months building our audience and showing exactly what we could provide for our readers and advertisers/sponsors alike.
Last week, our page views cruised past the 275,000 mark and the numbers of users on our site is rapidly approaching 75,000 readers, based mainly in the Niagara region.
As for exactly who is reading us, we feel we have the perfect demographic to pitch to our advertisers. Our website appeals to both males and females with almost 46 per cent of our readers being female. As for the age of our readership: 27.5 per cent are in the 18-24 age category; 33.5 per cent are in the 25-34 age category; 15.5 per cent are in the 35-44 age category; and, 12.5 per cent are in the 45-54 age category. Add it up and we have an astounding 76.5 per cent of our readers in the 18-44 age category.
We have crafted a number of what we believe are extremely affordable advertising packages to offer to businesses and organizations in Niagara. Without sufficient advertising revenue, BP Sports Niagara won’t exist. We are hoping the response to these packages will mirror the welcome we have received in the community since we began writing an on-line daily sports section in Niagara.
For more information about these packages, please call or text Bill (905-733-8205) or Bernie (289-214-3434). We would love to show you what we have to offer. One package we feel that will be extremely attractive is called our BPSN Supporter package. In this package, we will write a story on your business or organization that will cycle through our website (on mosaic for three or four days) and then stays on our site for one year in section called BPSN supporter. These stories would be perfect on the home pages of advertisers and organizations, detailing everything about your business or organization, crafted by professional writers.
In the coming weeks and months, we will be announcing a number of partnerships with local sports organizations that will include either advertising, sponsorship, content generation for web sites or a combination of the three.
We have had several sports groups offer us promotional considerations for our website in exchange for stories and photos. While this is a nice gesture — we will do coverage of local sports regardless of financial help from sports organizations — we need sports groups to step up financially to help make sure our site is financially viable. We understand the thought of sports groups helping to financially support sports coverage is a new concept, but the alternative is that local sports teams and athletes won’t get the coverage they richly deserve. We would love to come to a meeting of your board or executive to discuss how we can help each other.
In the next little while, you may see a few less stories on our website as we dedicate a portion of our time to soliciting advertising and sponsorships. Our complete focus on writing stories and photos will resume once we have sufficient revenue to continue the site.
Parents, coaches, players and fans of our local sports coverage can also help make our site a permanent fixture by clicking on the Support Us button on the lower, right hand side of our home page and contributing whatever they feel is appropriate. We have been encouraged by the response we have received so far — one woman from British Columbia sent us $150, one high school in Niagara contributed $200 on behalf of its teams and athletes, and a number of people have set up monthly contributions — but more contributions would be most welcome.
We appreciate the generous support we have received to date. Our pledge is to provide Niagara with the best local sports coverage and we promise to invest our profits into making the site even better. Please share our vision.
