We routinely send out postcards to most of the soccer tournaments we know of. The photo to the left is typically what comes back after a mailing. In all, we get about 20% of all postcards we send out returned back because the address is no longer valid.

The really sad thing is that the tournament is still being held, but someone else is in charge or they moved the PO Box or some other reason why the address is not longer valid. If TourneyCentral can’t even send a postcard to the right address because it moves so often, how do these tournaments expect teams to find them and apply?

And many teams don’t find them. Many teams that know where the tournament are being held, know the people putting on the tournament, etc. find and apply, but how do new teams find existing tournaments? Well, the sad truth is most of the time, they don’t!

Our Advice: Your life blood of growth is new teams coming to your tournament each year. Stay put! Get and keep a PO Box where teams can contact you. Get and keep a domain name for your tournament Web site so that when teams bookmark you one year, they can find you the next. Quit bouncing around and act like you want to be found.

Keep your listings up-to-date in the directories. It may be a small amount of work to stay current, but if one more new team finds you and applies, the effort pays for itself.

In this economy, coupons are hot! When your sponsors are running ads in your program and on your web site, you may want to encourage them to make it look like a coupon. Put a bar code on it, give it a dashed line, put a scissors clipping out the ad.

Take a look at this article before reading further.

Do you know where Del Mar is? Not by looking at the newspaper Web site. But then you are probably not their target market, so it probably doesn’t matter all that much. Unless you want to link to this story from your blog (like I wanted to do here.) Many newspaper Web sites o this. So do college Web site. You are here and if you don’t know where here is, well, we’re sure as heck are not going to tell you.

Now, take a look at your soccer tournament Web site. Can out-of-town teams figure out where you are without clicking through to several pages, maybe going to your map page? You know where you are, but do your guest teams — which you are trying to attract to your tournament — know where you are? When you write directions to the fields, do you assume the team is from out of town and write it from their point of view? Or, do you assume everyone knows that the 10 mile stretch of road is named three different things as it meanders through three different municipalities?

Our Advice: Build your Web site as if nobody knows who you are and WHERE you are. Assume the reader doesn’t know where “here” is and write directions so that they can find your fields and their hotel without any help from third-party tools.

We saw this concern from a team traveling in to a rather competitive tournament coming up in the next several months. We removed the names from the message.

Just an FYI. When I first communicated with the HOTEL REMOVED two weeks ago about reserving 18 rooms for the tournament in late April, the front desk told me I must speak with the Sales Manager (NAME REMOVED). I’ve been leaving messages for NAME REMOVED for two weeks, and she has never returned my calls. When I called again this AM, she finally answered and said she’s now out of rooms with double beds.

It’s disappointing to incur long distance charges and someone will not return a possible customer’s call, especially when you’re trying to schedule an almost 900 mile (round trip) road trip. I’m not sure if she had enough rooms when I initially called, but lack of communication resulted in wasting two weeks. I will try another hotel at this stage, but this is not a good representation for your tournament.

The hotels in your area are part of your soccer tournament brand. The quality of the tournament will be judged by whether or not the teams have a great hotel stay.

Our Advice: Work with your hotels closely. Call them weekly, perhaps even daily as your deadline approaches. Yes, they will probably be sick of hearing from you and your calls will go to voicemail, but since they are an integral part of your event, they should know that their performance with your guest teams are a top priority.

As team applications come in, mark the ones that are local and follow up with all others as soon as possible. Make sure that two weeks do not go by as the team is trying to book rooms.

Follow up note: The tournament director replied back almost immediately, volunteered to find rooms personally and the team found rooms nearby. One special mention is the team rep sent a note to the tournament director, closing the loop on the issue.

I received an email from one of our soccer tournaments yesterday, asking if we would put one of those soccer news feeds every other soccer Web site has in the sidebar or on the front page. The logic, he said, was that visitors would stay on the page longer reading the news and that is a good thing for sponsors.

Despite the conventional wisdom of these news feeds making pages sticky, they only really serve to “fill up space” for web sites that have a hard time coming up with fresh material. TourneyCentral soccer tournament sites don’t have that problem as there is always something going on.

Keep this in mind; Teams at a soccer tournament care about their games and their scores. The best way to serve your advertisers is to put them in the DEALS area and plug them. Even then, you’re only going to get major traffic at your deadline, when you accept teams, publish the schedule, directly before the tournament and during for scores. (and to the rules page when teams start losing on tiebreakers but that is a whole other article 😉 )

You are a DESTINATION site. Visitors go to your site for one reason only, to participate in your soccer tournament, i.e., apply, get scores, standings, deals, etc.

All this other stuff is just a distraction, clutter and more stuff to maintain that adds absolutely no value whatsoever. It is the same with online games, “engagement tools” like a spirit center, even photo uploads. If it did add value and it would help you monetize, we would already be doing it. It is in our best interest to generate page views as well.

Our Advice: You are better off writing news about YOUR tournament. Publish that on the front page and publish often. Engage with your teams by email when a significant event happens. (significant to them, not you.) And always be thinking when writing your news items, “What’s in it for my guests?” If you can’t come up with an answer that you would believe yourself, pass.