Jimmy Boyd in 
If you understand how to bet on sports and are good at predicting winners you might be interested in becoming a professional tipster. It can be a nice career where you make a living betting on games, and get a steady, supplemental income by offering your picks to fellow bettors.
In this guide I’ll walk you through the process of setting up a website to sell your sports picks and how to make it a profitable venture.
How Selling Sports Picks Works:
- Create a website with subscriptions and packages for visitors to purchase
- Enter your predictions using current lines from top sportsbooks
- Have those selections sent out to your subscribers
How to Start Selling Sports Picks Online
I want to make clear that I think the first thing you need to know how to do in order to sell your sports picks online is that you have to be able to win. I don’t want to take that for granted with this article because if you don’t know how to handicap sports and can’t win, you aren’t going to get repeat customers and you’ll never get any fresh leads.
Once you start winning, you might run into the problem of losing your outs. The sportsbooks don’t like giving money away so if you are a winning bettor you’ll eventually get limited or kicked out.
After facing those frustrations you might think your skills are going to waste, but the option to start selling picks is there and is a big reason why bettors start selling their advice. You won’t have to chase outs all the time and worry about getting paid.
Instead, you’ll help bettors win more money over their sportsbooks and in the process get paid for your efforts.
So, you are a winning bettor who has decided to sell his betting tips to paying customers. The next step is to build a sports handicapping website.
Build a Sports Handicapping Website
There are plenty of options when it comes to building a sports handicapping website, but the easiest option is with SportsCapping.com’s site design. That is the platform that this site is built on.
SportsCapping has been in business since 2008 and was built by guys who were in the industry before that. It provides all of the backend capabilities you need to get started from offering time-based subscriptions, packages for specific picks, and customer management.
The system handles all of the payment processing so you don’t have to worry about merchant accounts or chargebacks. You just get your commissions paid out to you at the end of every month.
It handles record keeping and acts as a monitor too. When you make your picks you select from current odds at widely available sportsbooks, so your customers can trust that you aren’t inflating your records.
You get a chance to build your reputation with transparent record keeping and battling it out with the best sports handicappers in the world to see who can make the most profit for their clients.
Products When Selling Sports Picks
There are several different ways for you to package your bets that will allow customers to purchase. Let’s look at each:
- Subscriptions: with subscriptions clients pay a set fee to access your selections for a certain period of time. This can be as short as a day or as long as a year at a time. Customers who have a subscription receive emails or alerts whenever you release a new recommended bet. Season subscriptions are also popular where the client gets all of your picks in a specific sport.
- Multi-Game Packages: this is typically a group of games taking place in one day. Tipsters will group games in similar start times and in the same sport.
- Individual Packages: you can also sell your picks individually. This is popular with the top plays of the day.
You should use more than one model so you can satisfy the requirements of different types of customers that you’ll have. Giving something for everyone isn’t a lot of extra work but will ensure you aren’t leaving sales on the table from customers not wanting to sign up long-term or vice-versa.
Delivering Your Betting Tips to Clients
Once you sell the picks how do you actually deliver them to clients?
- Member’s Area: you should have a members area where the visitors can see their current tips, view their order history, and see their active subscriptions.
- Email: an email should go out to customers as soon as picks are released. This helps them get the same lines as you had when making the recommendation.
- Text: sending texts might be quicker than email, but most providers are clamping down on handicapping services so might not be an option
Marketing Your Sports Handicapping Website
It doesn’t matter how good you are, if no one can ever find you then you aren’t going to make any sales. Here are some of the best ways to market your abilities:
- Monitors: have someone monitor your picks and keep track of your records. If you are near the top of the leaderboard you are going to get recognition and make sales because you have proven yourself to be a winner.
- Social Media: by having active social media accounts and giving out nuggets to follows you build up a following.
- Articles: display your expertise with articles on your site. Give general advice on handicapping, betting, futures odds, or game previews with predictions.
- Podcasts: you can start your own podcast or go on other people’s. This is a great way to showcase your knowledge and gain some attention.
- Newsletter: I suggest you start a newsletter where you give out free sports picks each day. This is a great chance of bettors to follow along and to see you know what you are doing.
The main thing to focus on with your marketing efforts are how can I show people that I’m an expert. If you do that then subscribers will quickly follow.
How Much Can I Make Selling Picks?
This is a tough question to answer. The top services make well over six figures each year. The guys who aren’t as good don’t make much at all. It all depends on your skill level and how good of a job you do at delivering winners to clients.
If you can help people profit, they’ll come back year-after-year. I’ve had guys subscribing for several years and if you can get that kind of recurring base it really snowballs into a nice lifestyle.
It also helps that I make a decent living betting as well, but you can maintain a nice lifestyle in the world of sports handicapping.