NorthJerseySports.com was started by two local journalists who recognized the need and demand for better high school sports coverage in the area.

Starting in Bergen County and then moving into Passaic and then Hudson counties NorthJerseySports.com began to take off on the strength of its extensive content. From award-winning photography to powerful stories and columns, NorthJerseySports.com expanded high school sports coverage like never before.

In addition to ‘traditional’ media coverage, including game coverage, features and columns, NorthJerseySports.com has introduced multimedia features including streaming audio and video sections to the site. Photo galleries, polls and the NorthJerseySports.com School Store soon followed.

But NorthJerseySports.com is much more than just cutting edge high school sports coverage. The goal of the website is to create a local sports community so that the sports, schools and athletes can actually take part in the overall coverage.

NORTHJERSEYSPORTS.com NAVIGATION

The site is broken down into three interrelated parts – sports, schools and special sections.

Special sections include all of NorthJerseySports.com’s multimedia content, photo galleries, recruiting section, school store and more. All of which are accessible from everywhere on the site.

In an effort to create the kind of Interactive High School Sports Community that we envisioned a schools section was created on the site where every school in our coverage area, which includes nearly 100 schools, gets its own ‘Home Page’ on NorthJerseySports.com.

The page is free of charge and allows schools to post news and information about their respective athletic programs on the Internet. The pages are smartly designed in the school’s colors, emblazoned with the mascot.

Sport-specific pages create a way for sports fans to easily find and view content about their favorite sport quickly and easily. Every varsity sport that we cover has its own page with just news about that particular sport.

All three sections of NorthJerseysSports.com work together to form a unique high school sports experience for the user. It is easily negotiable for the novice yet provides enough compelling content to keep even the most advanced audience online.

WHY ADVERTISE WITH NORTHJERSEYSPORTS.com?

If you keep up with the news you obviously know that the ‘dot com boom’ has gone bust. Large websites with tons of capital investment money, but little in the way of solid business plans, have become ‘dot gones.’

But NorthJerseySports.com is a local business, born through a grass roots effort, seeking its place in the local community and laying down a solid foundation to reach that goal.

We started by introducing ourselves to our readership one by one, hand shake by hand shake, business card by business card. And today our website, strictly devoted to local high school sports, has grown to include three of United States’ most affluent and technologically savy counties.

Numbers recently released by the AOL-TimeWarner media conglomerate state the Internet service provider America Online signed up 29 million new members in the year 2001, an 11 percent increase from the year before. Similarly, old-fashioned newspaper sales declined across the board over that same time period. Even the New York Times, the most highly read and respected daily in the United States, has seen a decline in its circulation, but a sharp jump in hits to its website.

Of the three Northern New Jersey counties that we currently cover Bergen and Passaic are listed in Yahoo Internet Life’s America’s Most Wired Cities 2002. The adjacent counties come in as the 65th most wired ‘city’ in the nation among such metropolises as San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Boston, Seattle and, of course, New York City.

Essentially the survey assesses the ‘city’s’ place in the country in terms of Internet use. Things like percentage of households online, user expertise, domain density (which examines the geographic distribution of net use and its relationship to local economies) and available content.

The Internet is no longer a fad. It is here to stay and the only evidence needed to back up that statement is a look at the curriculum at every high school in Northern New Jersey and around the country. We know — we’ve been there.

In our efforts to establish ourselves in the local market, we have sent representatives into local high schools to introduce our programs. And while there we have never been asked ‘What is the Internet?’ or ‘How do I log on?’ Most of the questions, asked in state of the art computer labs, were of the variety of ‘What software do you use?’ ‘How can we get more involved?’

We know our readership, many of them by name and email address. We know your target audience and we can make a formal introduction to build further relationships profitable to all parties.

From site-wide sponsorship to weekly ads on various school pages, NorthJerseySports.com can can help your business develop an advertising program that works.

GRAB A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER’S ATTENTION, AND KEEP IT!

When a user logs on to NorthJerseySports.com, it is not a quick visit. Our site, one of the most innovative on the Internet, is designed to lead our readers on a journey through a variety of features that command attention.

The average time a NorthJerseySports.com viewer spends on our site per day is close to ten minutes, giving you, our advertiser, a lengthy period of time to grab a reader’s attention and hold it. We can custom build your ad to be with a reader every step of the way on his path through the website.

No newspaper, with local sports sections printed in black and white with ad placements buried at the bottom of the least desirable pages, can offer such advantages. And no other website, local or national, can offer such creativity nor guarantee that potential customers will see your ad.

We have a solid relationship with our readers based on three years of ground-breaking local sports coverage, and can extend that relationship to you with advertising rates that can fit any budget in any economic climate.

NO TECHNO BABBLE

Don’t let the fact that you aren’t a computer expert keep you from cashing in on advertising on the Internet. Many advertisers feel intimidated by their lack of knowledge regarding terms associated with information technology.

Don’t know the difference between megabyte and a gigabyte? Neither do we!

Actually, we do and we’d be more than happy to explain it to you along with any other questions you might have about computers, the Internet and how to maximize your profits.

When you call one of NorthJerseySports.com’s advertising representatives they will speak to you in English, not Computer-ese. We’ll explain your options in terms that you can understand. Your company doesn’t need an existing website for its advertising campaign on NorthJerseySports.com to be successful.

We can build business information pages that will show potential customers what your company is all about. We can even make a custom, web-ready logo for your business. Of course if you have an existing website and want to talk PDFs or the benefits of HTML vs. Rich Text Format, we can do that too, but every business, from IBM to Little Joe’s Deli, will be made to feel comfortable by our representatives.

THEIR WORDS, NOT OURS

Here is a small sampling of the response that NorthJerseySports.com has gotten from its readership in three years ofchanging the face of local high school sports coverage:

“I can’t tell you how much we enjoy this site.  I’ve put it on my toolbar, so I can access it easily.  Thanks for the personal touch. I really appreciate it.”

Wendy Burgess
Palisades Park High School Baseball Parent

“I have learned about your site from my son, since then I have always logged on to read about our local sports that the newspaper doesn’t cover in depth.  You’re doing an excellent job. You have my support!”

Andrew Katsigiannis
Cliffside Park Baseball Parent

“I wish to compliment you and your staff on the High School Football coverage. My son plays for Mahwah and the coverage has been superb. The articles are on the money and the photos are great. I have relatives all over the country and this is a way to stay close to the action in a timely manner. My compliments again as I look forward to next week.”

Ron Gifford Sr.
Mahwah High School Football Parent