Im pretty new to this all. So i would like some advice on SEO and marketing for a football blog. You can see it here - www.footiesource.com - It's for latest transfers and rumors etc.
Keep updating regular, try to use keywords in your content.. you could add links to social networking sites like digg and stumble upon. There are many plugins for wordpress that do this.. Try to get some backlinks.. if you good quality content, they will come. It might be worth submitting the site to a few of the bigger directories.
In my experience, running a successful football website is about having two things. Very frequently updated, original news articles or A community of football fans where the fans can interact with each other, discussing news, transfers and so on. If you can get both, you'll have a great site. In the beginning you just have to make sure you're creating quality original articles, give the reader a reason to want to read your articles over somewhere else like a big news corporation. Originality and maybe taking a different angle on how you approach the news could be effective.
Articles are key. I have a site that is just beginning to get some really good traffic after just 6 months. Keep it current and keep it interesting for your readers.
As you are going to concentrate only on club transfers it's going to be a seasonal website. If I am not wrong there will around 2 or 3 months per year when the transfers takes place. In that case you will get very less traffic in the remaining 9 months. So I would not recommend seo. Even if your blog does well in serp, people will not be searching for transfer news all the year. So try to work on social bookmarking and community sites. If you are first to bring out the transfer you can bring lot's visitor via stumbleupon, digg and propeller. You can also try facebook and orkut for this matter.