It’s easy to assume that if your Instagram and TikTok are in good shape, a website is redundant, an extra thing to maintain that duplicates what’s already on your socials. It isn’t, and for drivers building toward sponsorship, it matters more than people think.
Affiliate schemes need somewhere to live
A lot of the companies you end up working with will offer you an affiliate scheme or a discount code for your followers. Social media captions can mention these, but they’re temporary, easy to scroll past and impossible to search back through later. A website gives you somewhere permanent to talk about a partner honestly and legitimately, in more depth than a caption allows, and somewhere a follower can go back to weeks later when they’re ready to buy.
That’s exactly what a sponsor is after: genuine exposure to people who might become customers, not just a mention that disappears into a feed within a day.
Trackable links are worth more than they sound
Links through your own website are trackable in a way that social media bios and swipe-ups often aren’t. That means you, and any partner, can see what’s working: which posts sent people their way, how many clicks a code got, whether a particular piece of content drove real traffic.
That data becomes genuinely useful the next time you’re putting a proposal together. It turns “we have a good following” into “here’s what our following did,” backed by numbers rather than an estimate.
It’s the same principle behind the referral links you’ll see agencies like us using for tools such as Vista Social, which a lot of our drivers end up using to manage their own accounts. A trackable link works precisely because it can be traced back to whoever shared it. That’s the model worth copying once you’ve got partners of your own.
Disclose sponsors and affiliate codes properly
If you’re posting an affiliate code or talking about a paid partnership, it needs to be marked as an ad, a straightforward #ad or #spon on the post is enough. This isn’t really about the ASA trawling through junior motorsport accounts looking for undisclosed affiliate links, because in practice that’s rarely how it gets flagged. It’s usually a competitor, a rival driver, a rival brand, or someone with a reason to look closely, who reports it. Getting the disclosure right from the start costs you nothing and removes a problem before anyone goes looking for one.
Build an audience you own
This is the strongest reason to have a website once your social accounts are established. Add a simple email sign-up to it and you start building a list of people who follow you independently of any platform’s algorithm. Instagram and TikTok can change how they distribute content overnight, and neither of them lets you contact your following directly. A mailing list can’t be taken away from you, and it’s worth setting up long before you have anything to send, so it’s already there and growing by the time you need it.
Get your own name as the domain, not a themed one
Before any of this, you need a domain, and it’s worth getting right first time rather than changing it once you’ve built a following on the wrong one. Go for your actual name, hakeembhatt.com rather than something built around “racing,” “motorsport” or a team name. A themed domain locks the brand to exactly where you are right now, and if you move up a category, change teams, or the brand needs to grow beyond karting, the name domain still works while the themed one starts to feel dated.
We’ve seen this play out directly. One of our drivers, James Kell, started out on jameskellmotorsport.com. We kept an eye on jameskell.com in the background, and when it came up for renewal and lapsed, we moved him straight over to it. It’s a better domain in every way, shorter, more credible to a sponsor or journalist looking him up, and it’ll still make sense whatever category he’s racing in five years from now. Worth watching for from day one rather than settling for a themed name and hoping to move later.
If you can only buy one, get the .com. It’s still the more globally recognised extension, and a motorsport career has a real chance of going international within a few years, at which point .com reads correctly to a sponsor or team based anywhere. Domains are cheap either way, a few pounds a year each, so buy the .co.uk too if it’s available, and redirect it to your .com. That protects the name from anyone else taking it and costs next to nothing. We’d skip a .racing domain entirely unless the name is genuinely already gone on both of the others, it’s a fallback, not a first choice.
If you’d rather have this set up properly for you rather than figuring out hosting, templates and domain registration yourselves, that’s exactly the kind of thing we do. Details are on our driver websites page.
It doesn’t need to be complicated
A website at this stage doesn’t need to be elaborate. A simple site covering who you are, your racing history, your results, links to your content and a page for partners is enough to start. What matters is that it exists, that it’s kept up to date, and that it gives your partners and your affiliate links a proper home rather than relying on social media alone to do that job.
Once it’s live, keeping it current is the part that quietly slips, a blog post that never gets written, a bio that’s a year out of date. That ongoing upkeep is included in our Full Digital Management retainer alongside your socials and sponsor reporting, so the site never falls back out of date while you’re busy racing.
Next in this series: what to prioritise in year one of building your racing brand.
