How To Build Sports Betting Model

 
Build

Often, I write information about how to make money as a sports bettor. Some professional bettors are able to turn a long-term profit, but there’s no doubt that it’s hard to do.

But learning how to beat the bookmakers isn’t the only way to make money in the sports betting world. The bookmakers are the ones making most of the money, so you could consider starting your own bookmaking business.

The problem with this is that the legal issues and cost often make it difficult or impossible.

  • The concept of a winning sports betting system seems simple. If you flip a coin to pick games, you can win 50% of the time. When you factor in the vig charged by bookmakers, you have to win 52% to 53% of the time, depending on the vig you pay, to turn a profit.
  • Sports betting could be more than using your gut feeling. Check out the data science strategy I used to make $20,000 betting on sports. This guide shows you the step by step algorithm to sports bet smarter using Python and also more tips about it.

But there’s another way you can make money in the sports betting world. What if you were able to sell sports-betting tips and advice to others?

If you want to know how to start your own business selling sports picks, I’ve compiled a guide to help you get started.

No you don't have to be a programming wiz to build a sports betting model. Most successful bettors are not. But the more you do know about spreadsheets and the like, the better off you will be and the more powerful your testing and analysis will be. And perhaps most of all, the more efficiently you will make use of your time.

The profit potential can be big. For most bettors, it can offer the chance for far greater profits than betting on games.

If you can find 100 people willing to pay you $100 a month for picks, you can make $10,000 a month. Or you can make the same if you can find 1,000 people willing to buy picks for $10 a month.

The number of sports bettors making $10,000 a month is small, but if you know how to market your services, you have a real chance of making money with less risk than betting on games.

Models

One of the first things you need to do is decide which model you plan to use to sell picks. The three main models are:

  • Subscription – In the subscription model, your buyers pay a set fee, usually on a weekly or monthly basis, and receive a set number of picks each term. This is a good model for ongoing income, because once you get someone signed up, you just have to keep them happy to keep the money flowing.
  • Package – A package is somewhat like a subscription in that you sell more than one pick at a time. But it’s usually a one-time fee for a package of picks. A common package is for all of the NFL games for the week or all of the MLB games for the day.
  • Individual – Selling individual picks is just like it sounds. You sell your pick for a particular game. This can be by the game of the week or by offering a series of games where your customers can pick the individual games they want picks for.

Of course, you can use more than one model, or a combination of models. And these aren’t the only ways to sell picks. These are just the most common.

One model isn’t necessarily better than another, and once you build your customer base, you might want to offer multiple options.

You can have different levels of subscription models and different size packages. A subscription model could have a silver, gold, and platinum level, where the silver members get 5 games a week, the golds get 10, and the platinum members get 20.

If you sell packages, you can sell a set package with specific games, or you can sell a package of credits, where your customers can pick a set number of individual games they want picks for.

The model you use is up to you and depends on how you want to run your business. I suggest starting with one model and expanding from there.

I prefer the subscription model, because if you do a good job keeping your bettors happy, you can predict your income from week to week or month to month, and you only have the marketing cost of acquiring the customer the first time.

Marketing

The thing that makes or breaks your ability to make money selling sports betting picks isn’t your ability to pick winners. The most important thing is your ability to market your services and acquire paying customers.

You can use a wide range of marketing options to build your business. Here are a few ideas to help you get started:

  • Social Media – It seems like everyone is on social media of some sort these days. People spend a great deal of time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a host of other media platforms.

The biggest issue with building your sports betting customer base on social media platforms are the cost and the terms. Some social media outlets avoid gambling-related ads and services, and the ones that allow gambling ads have a competitive market that drives the prices up.

  • Print – Print advertising is available in a wide range of options, including newspapers and magazines. Just like with most forms of advertising, you need to keep a close eye on your costs, but if you can figure out the formula for making more than you spend, print advertising is plentiful, so you won’t run out of places to advertise.
  • Radio – Radio isn’t one of the most popular forms of advertising, but many sports bettors are radio listeners. They listen to games and sports talk radio, so if you can buy radio spots during games and/or on sports talk shows and stations, you can reach your target market.

You can find thousands of radio stations that are looking for advertisers, so you have plenty of options.

  • Television – Sports bettors watch games on television and follow sports news on stations like ESPN. You sometimes run into the same challenges as social media, as television stations can be afraid of running gambling-related advertising.
  • Pay-Per-Click – You can run pay-per-click ads, also called PPC, on the internet. Search engines like Google and Yahoo sell ads where you only pay when someone clicks on your ads. Read the terms and conditions to find out if they take gambling ads.
  • Your Own Website – You should create your own website if you want to sell sports picks. But creating a site is only a small part of the battle. You still need to get potential customers to the site. You can drive traffic to your site using the other forms of marketing listed above and learn some basic search engine optimization (called SEO) strategies to get search engine traffic.

In order to succeed, you need to be able to get potential customers to your site. You need to explore these marketing options and any others you run across to see if you can profitably get new customers.

When you figure out how to acquire new customers for less than what they pay you, your new business has a chance to grow and create a long-term profit.

If you continually need to find new customers, it can be costly, so try to maximize the value of each customer you get. You can maximize the value by increasing the amount they spend on their first purchase and by getting them to continue spending money after their initial purchase.

Delivery

The next thing you need to consider is how you plan to deliver your picks. You have a few different options, and the technology available today makes it easier than ever. Here are the most common options:

  • Email – Email is the best way for most pick sellers to get started. All you need to do is get your buyer’s email when they sign up, and then add them to your list. You can get email list software that makes it easy to manage your list and still sends emails for free.
  • Private Website – You can also set up a private area on your website that people have to log in to access. You can post your picks to the private area, and each of your buyers can have a separate login and password to access the picks.
  • Answering System – You can record your picks on an answering machine or through a cell phone voicemail system. This becomes complicated when you sell different picks and packages, and how do you keep someone who drops your service from continuing to call and get your picks? You can find ways around this, but this isn’t the way I’d get started.
  • Fax – Fax delivery is not as popular as it once was, but some people still use it. Even if your buyers don’t have a fax machine, some of them can receive faxes as email now. I don’t recommend using a fax delivery system, because email and a private website are easier to set up or have set up, and most people who bet on sports at least know how to use one or the other.

If you don’t know anything about setting up websites and private areas online, I suggest using email to get started. If you can get a private area set up, it can be better than email, because you don’t have to worry about your emails not getting delivered or being put in a spam folder.

You can also offer a combination of both email and a password-protected section of your site, so your buyers can use whichever method they prefer.

Pricing

A big decision needs to be made about how much you plan to charge for your subscription, picks, and packages. If you research the prices charged by current pick sellers, you can find prices ranging from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars.

To some degree, the less you charge, the more likely someone is to try your services, but this isn’t 100% accurate. People decide to spend money for a variety of different reasons, and sometimes it takes just as much effort and money to get someone to buy at a lower price as it does at a higher price.

You need to charge enough so that you can afford to advertise to get new customers, but you don’t want to charge so much that many people can’t afford to buy. This is something that many businesses struggle with.

In business, you want to be profitable and maximize the profits, but finding the right mix is challenging. The best thing to do is test as many options and price points as possible to learn where you can make the most profit.

Most people don’t think anything about spending a few dollars a day on coffee, or cigarettes, or the lottery, or something else. Most of us have something we spend money on without thinking about it.

If you spend $3 a day on something, that adds up to around $90 a month. This is a decent estimate of what you might be able to charge your customers, if you can convince them it’s a good deal. I see many pick subscriptions and packages around $100 a month.

Of course, I see many at much higher prices, too. Part of your price strategy involves your target customers. If you target the average weekend sports bettor, you might charge $49.99 a month. But if you target high-end bettors, you might be able to charge $499 a month.

One way to offer something for almost everyone is by providing different subscription levels, or packages with different prices and services attached. An entry-level membership might cost $19.99 a month and provide five picks a week.

The top-end subscription might cost $199 a month and provide 20 picks a week and advanced analysis for some games.

You can set your prices at whatever you want, because there’s no industry norm. But you should set them at the point where you can maximize your profits, whether this is from many people at a low price or fewer people at a high price.

One thing to remember is that it’s difficult to raise your price for your existing customers. But just because you have some customers paying one price doesn’t mean you can’t charge more for the same service for new customers.

Do You Have to Be Good at Picking Winners?

Most people think they have to be good at picking winners to sell picks. While it helps if you’re good at picking winners, the truth is that if you do a good job marketing, it doesn’t really matter.

It doesn’t matter if you consistently beat the sportsbooks, because no one is going to buy your picks just because of this. Everyone that tries to sell picks claims that they can beat the books.

You can find all kinds of outrageous claims and fuzzy math to back them up. I’ve seen all kinds of supposed proof, and after a while it all seems like a sleazy sales pitch.

And once you learn how some sleazy operators work, you’re probably never going to buy a pick again. But you don’t have to operate like them.

Here’s an example:

If you can use effective marketing and advertising to generate a stream of paying customers, you can simply flip a coin when you make your picks. Or you can give half your customers one side of a game and the other half the other side of a game.

Let’s say that you can get 400 customers to sign up for a game-of-the-week package for $49 a month. The first week, you give 200 of them one side of a game, and the other 200 the other side of the game. You do the same thing the second, third, and fourth week.

After the first week, 200 customers received a winning pick, and 200 received a losing pick. After the second week, 100 customers received two winners in a row, 200 customers have received one winner and one loser, and 100 customers have received two losers in a row.

After four weeks, you have 25 customers that have received four straight winners, 100 customers that are 3 and 1, 150 customers that are 2 and 2, 100 customers that are 1and 3, and 25 customers that have received four straight losers.

The 25 customers that have received four winners in a row are likely to continue, and the 100 that are 3 and 1 are also likely to continue. You could offer anyone else that doesn’t continue their subscription a half-off deal for the next month.

If you can keep acquiring new customers for a reasonable amount of money, you can build a profitable business model and never have to make a real pick.

I don’t recommend doing business this way. The reason I showed you this example is so you can see why marketing is more important than being able to pick winners.

Of course, it’s best if you can pick winners and learn how to become a good marketer. If you can consistently give your customers good service and winning picks, you can build a solid business that can give you a good profit for years to come.

Do You Have to Be Sleazy?

You just read an example of a sleazy pick seller. A person who runs a business like the one in the example is dishonest, and an argument could be made that they’re a thief. They don’t offer any true value to their customers.

But the sleaze factor doesn’t stop here in the pick selling business. Many sellers make outrageous claims about how great their picks are and how they guarantee winners. They can run a different scam much like the one in the example by offering a money-back guarantee on their picks.

You pay for a pick and supposedly get your money back if it doesn’t win. They give half the buyers one side of a game and the other half the other side. When the losers try to get their money back, they get offered a free pick or a series of free picks instead.

Let me be clear about this: you don’t have to be sleazy to sell sports picks. Most people aren’t going to believe anything you tell them anyway, so why make untrue and outrageous claims?

Set up and run your business in a different way. Try being honest and try to give true value to your customers. Most pick buyers are so used to getting screwed that if they find a seller who gives good service and is honest, they can be turned into lifetime customers.

It’s up to you how you set up and run your business, but companies that don’t offer any real value to their customers tend to fail. It doesn’t always happen fast, but eventually they tend to crash and burn.

It costs so much to acquire new customers that you can’t afford lose too many of them once you have them. When you run your pick-selling business ethically and continually offer value, you have a good chance to survive and thrive. It’s not a guarantee of success, but it gives the best odds for long-term profits.

Conclusion

If you want to create a way to make money from the sports betting business, consider starting your own pick service. Use this guide about how to start your own business of selling sports picks to get started.

The key is figuring out how to be an effective marketer and offering good service and value to your customers. If you can do these two things, the rest will take care of itself. In this guide, you learned how to pick a model, price your services, and deliver your picks, and the best marketing options to get started.

Now all you need to do is take action. Either build a website or find someone to build one for you, offer a subscription service or package, and start driving traffic to your site

Ever wondered how you are actually doing in sports betting?

Just like tracking your finances can be an eye opening experience (I spent how much at restaurants last month?!), tracking your bets can shed some light on your performance.

Download the free sports bet tracking spreadsheet below to get started (available for both Excel and Google Sheets):

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet: Instant Insights

If you want to measure your performance and see where you are succeeding and failing, you need to track it.

With this free tool, you can see your performance broken down by various dimensions.

Have a great ROI on betting NBA 2nd halves? Getting solid closing line value on NFL point spreads? This spreadsheet allows you to answer questions like this and more.

How to use the spreadsheet

While the spreadsheet is pretty straightforward, I’d like to walk you through how it works.

How to track sports bets

Everything lives in the “Bet Log” tab. This is the only place information is manually entered. Once the data is entered there, all other tabs will automatically populate.

In the “Bet Log” tab, blue columns are required while red columns are optional. The more information you input, the more useful the spreadsheet will be.

Entering things like the closing line, while slightly annoying, will also be the most important to your success.

How to analyze performance

Each tab will have different graphs and tables that show your performance. The beauty of this is that you can filter the data by any dimension you like.

Any yellow cell is an “input” cell that can be changed. All of these are dropdowns that are pre-populated based on the information you enter in the Bet Log.

How to add more leagues and teams

To add new leagues and teams, you will do so in the “REF” tab. This tab holds all of the lookup information for the dropdowns throughout the spreadsheet.

Again, the cells available to modify are in yellow. You can add the following dimensions:

  • Leagues (ex: WNBA)
  • Teams (ex: Chicago Sky)
  • Tags (ex: 2nd half)

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Metrics

Deciding what to track is important in determining how you measure success. The spreadsheet tracks the following key metrics:

Closing Line Value

Closing line value (CLV) is a measure of how much better or worse the odds you bet at were compared to where they closed.

If you believe the markets you are betting into are efficient (NFL point spreads, MLB moneylines, etc.), then CLV is a great predictor of long term success.

All you need to do is input the odds you placed your bet at as well as where the odds closed. Preferably you use a market making sportsbook like Pinnacle to decide what the “true” closing line was.

Profit

Profit is about as simple as it gets. Are you making or losing money?

While this is the “bottom line”, surprisingly it isn’t always predictive of long term success. Still, you will obviously want to see how much money you have made or lost.

ROI

This is what most people tend to look at. It is a measure of how profitable you are relative to how much you are risking.

While at the end of the day, the money in your pocket is what matters, this metric focuses more on results rather than process and is a measure of efficiency.

ROI isn’t as predictive of long term winning as CLV, but is useful to track to see where you stand.

Risk

This one is simple, yet will likely give you insights into where you are putting your money.

If you have a model, does it consistently value the Dallas Cowboys differently than the market? Thus making many of your bets on the Cowboys? Analyzing your risk by league/team/bet type can give you these types of answers.

Bankroll

Bankroll will track our running total of how much money you have in your accounts across all sportsbooks. You can also see this trended over time to help you see any changes in your betting strategy and how that has affected your bankroll.

It is very useful to see, at a glance, where your money lies. Is 95% of our bankroll at FanDuel? Maybe you should shift some to DraftKings.

Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Dimensions

Having these metrics available is important, but insights really come from slicing the data by different dimensions.

League/Team

Tracking your performance by league or team can give you clues into where your strengths or weaknesses are.

Do you watch every second of every New York Knicks game? Think you have an edge on Knicks games? You can find out using the spreadsheet.

Same goes for leagues. Do you follow NFL closely but use strictly numbers for NCAA Basketball? Compare the performance of the two and see what’s working.

Bet Type

Looking at performance by bet type can also shed some light on your process, especially if it is model driven.

How to build a sports betting model in excel

Track your performance by the following bet types:

  • Spread
  • Moneyline
  • Total
  • Prop
  • Future

You can also use the “Tag” field to designate special types of bets. For example, if you want to see your performance on moneylines for NBA 2nd halves, you would put “2H” (or something similar) in the Tag field and “moneyline” in the bet type field.

How To Make A Sports Betting Model

Date

A common way to analyze performance is to look at metrics trended over time.

Look at any of the metric/dimension combinations above trended over any time period you’d like.

How To Build A Sports Betting Model In Python

Want to see your performance over the last 14 days? Or how about the last 12 weeks? Both are possible here.

Google Sheets Sports Betting Tracker

How To Build A Sports Betting Model

The sports betting tracker is also available on Google Sheets. While the features are the same as the Excel file, Google Sheets has some notable benefits:

  • Available/online at all times
  • Can enter bets on your phone using the Sheets app
  • You don’t need to be at a computer to enter your bets
  • Google Sheets auto saves any changes
  • Allows multiple users to be in the sheet at the same time and make changes

How To Build A Sports Betting Model In Excel

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