Posted 6/17/08 - Kellex

I know I’ve slumped in the last month on the networking front and my stats will be feeling it at the end of this month. In my first 2.5 months I had a Technorati authority of 50+ and since then I’ve added just 12 more and have been stuck at 62 for quite some time. (Slacker!) It’s time to jump back on the networking wagon with a quick refresher on our top 5 tips…

1. Commenting (Yes I brought it up again!) - It really is a huge deal if you want to make some friends that will continue to link, participate and spread the word on your blog. I’m am the worst at this and always tell myself that I don’t have time, but the truth is, I need to make time.

2. Link Lists – Almost as important as commenting and some would argue that it is more important. You’ll notice that we ran our “DollarBall” post yesterday for the first time in a while because it’s time to start growing again. Link it up to your peers and the chances of them returning the favor are pretty high.

3. Guest Posts – Asked anyone if you could guest post lately? This is something many of us feel uncomfortable doing, but it’s also something that you have to do. What’s surprising about guest posting, is your idea machine (brain) immediately starts flowing once someone says “yes.” Your post will likely be better than your every day posts and should help bring in a ton of new readers to your niche.

4. Social Bookmarking – We’ve hammered the hell out of this in the past and will continue to until something better comes along. Through our search bar or category list you can find tons of information on these with our favorites being Stumble Upon, YardBarker, and BallHype. We don’t mention Digg all that much anymore as it has basically become useless to sports bloggers unless you have a new and creative video that no one has seen before. YardBarker at this point, tends to be dominating the rest.

5. Interviews – Plain and simple, ask someone if you can interview them! Think about how you would feel if someone asked to interview you. Would feel good huh? I’m not sure that anyone, aside from maybe a pro blogger, has turned down an interview when asked. Throw together a quick 5-10 question list and send it off in a well written email. You may have instantly gained a reader just by asking!

Time to join ClickBooth to help monetize your site, don't you think?

Posted 6/10/08 - Kellex

Some extra good news was released last night from the Yardbarker camp that you all should be very excited about. Yardbarker has formed a partnership with Fox Sports that will allow it to share its network's blogs' content with the sports super power.

If you are a part of the YBN, and write interesting top 10 lists or other humorous content then there is a good chance your work could be grabbed and released to thousands of people through Fox's sports site. They aren't looking for your boring old recaps and game previews; they want the stuff that blogs are so good at, being creative!

Right now the process looks to be a little clunky but the crew at Yardbarker hopes to automate it in the near future.

As a sports blogger, you should be very eager to submit articles that could be used. Hitting Fox's site may not be as good as Extra Mustard, but it should still bring you a ton of useful traffic. Join the YBN and start cookin' up that magic sports blog material!

If you have questions or concerns about this new idea, you should contact Dewey and let him know you are interested. Also, feel free to let me know if you have any questions!


Did you know you can sell links on your site with Text-Link-Ads?

Posted 5/21/08 - Kellex

Many new bloggers, wait, most bloggers in general are obsessed with social media sites and the potential they have to bring in thousands of visitors to their sites. As a sports blogger, I definitely pay attention to what is happening on Digg, BallHype and Yardbarker but I’ve realized that these are not reliable forms of traffic and the amount of time put in to them may not be worth it. I still see dozens of new sports bloggers spamming up Digg, BallHype, and Yardbarker with hopes of having the next Stuff that White People Like. Sorry to be the thousandth person to break this to you, but it will probably never happen!

There are other sites out there that can deliver more targeted traffic than any of the Digg’s or BallHype’s of the world. Social media sites tend to send the “quickie” visitor that is there just to catch a quick snippet of the big article of the day and decide whether or not they would like to hype it. The chances of that visitor hanging around to view the rest of your blog or click on any of your ads are probably minimal. It’s time to think even bigger and better!

When our NBA blog, Le Basketbawl, was in its early stages we had no idea how to work social media or drive traffic or basically gain any sort of reader other than working over forums. We definitely knew what BallHype and Digg were, but had no clue on how to make the first page or create a neat little clique that would drive our work out to the world. Instead we focused all that we had on writing fun and interesting content that we hoped would either sit well in search engines or get picked up by TrueHoop or Ball Don’t Lie. We would write up an article and send emails to Henry or Kelly Dwyer in hopes of getting on their daily link lists which basically never happened until that one magical day when I wrote a post based on the upcoming Oscars but with an NBA twist, conveniently titled the 2008 NBA Oscars.

Ever heard of Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard? (As a sports blogger you should have!) They picked up the post and within minutes our blog had 100’s of visitors which at the time was an incredible thing! While our post spent the entire day on Extra Mustard’s Hot Clicks it ended up generating a few thousand hits. Our blog exploded that day and I think we even shared a little champagne to celebrate. (OK not really, but it sounded nice didn’t it?)

From there, Extra Mustard found a liking to us and picked up our Top 6: Worst Hairstyles in the NBA and Top 7 Pretty Boys articles. (February was our month, woo!)

Here are the stats from the 3 articles of ours it picked up:

-Top 7 Pretty Boys – Ran 2/22/08
-Top 6: Worst Hairstyles – Ran 2/18/08
-2008 NBA Oscars – Ran 2/05/08

(It should be noted that the Pretty Boys article ran on a Friday. Extra Mustard does not perform updates on the weekends so it ran all weekend long!)

Of course once again, one of the major points in this article boils down to content. Content remains king over any traffic building tool you could use with your blog. We had no idea what Extra Mustard was until they picked us up and the traffic started raging in. In other words, we did not submit our articles to Extra Mustard; instead they picked our articles up because they thought their viewers would enjoy our work. Besides the thousands of visitors our blog saw on these days, it ended up generating links, return visitors and a ton of exposure for our new NBA blog.

What should you take from this article? It really is time to look elsewhere for some big time traffic. Almost all of the big time sports blogs out there ask their readers to submit interesting articles to them so their work is cut down. SPORTSbyBROOKS, the Big Lead, Deadspin and even SI’s Extra Mustard all have “submit” buttons that you should be utilizing. Your articles may not appear on these sites all the time, but if you really take some time to create great stuff, you will increase your chances. One article, one time on any of these sites can mean big things for your blog.

If you have success stories with any of these sites, I’d love to hear them!

Have you signed up for the PepperJAM Network and Review ME yet?

Posted 5/20/08


Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog and the Sports Blogger Forums for discussing blogging

How I Added 50 Stumble Upon Friends in One Week

Social media sites are a good way to build traffic to your blog with little effort, but most of them don’t work for sports blogs. Digg certainly won’t work, and even if it did, it offers terrible traffic quality. Stumble Upon, however, works for almost any kind of site. I’ll tell you from experience it works great with sports blogs and has great traffic quality.

Take a look at how Stumble Upon visitors compare to the average visitors to my site Juiced Sports Blog:
Source-Pages/Visit-Time on Site
Stumble Upon-2.11-1:45
Site Average-1.73-1:07

Furthermore, you don’t need a ton of friends to get good traffic volume. However, the more friends you have the better, so here are some tricks I used to increase my friend count by 50 in one week.

Give Away Free Stumbles

This is the fastest way to build your friend count. Go to webmaster forums and post saying you are going to give away free Stumbles to anyone who wants them. Tell them to PM you and reply. There are sub forums in most forums titled “services” for these kind of exchanges. Some forums like Digital Point have banned free Stumble giveaways, but many haven’t, and I’ll list some good ones in a sec.

But first, here’s how it works. How do you gain friends by giving away free Stumbles? After you Stumble their site, send back a PM saying you Stumbled them and asking if they would please add you as a friend and give them your link. 90% of the people will add you as a friend.

Here’s some forums to make such a post, ranked in order of traffic:
V7N
Webmaster Talk
Webmaster Forums
Webmaster Forums.net

For many of these forums, you will need 10 or 20 posts before you can post in the requests/services category. I know for V7N, it’s 10, so just make posts in other categories first.

You will get a lot of PM’s early on, but they eventually die down and your thread will get buried, so periodically, you should go back and make a post yourself to the extent of “Sites Stumbled.”

Message People With Similar Interests

On social media sites, people like to be interacted with, so if you make an effort to connect with them, they will likely reciprocate. Get some interesting things Stumbled on your page about the topic you are targeting, possibly write a blog post on your profile, then search for people interested in that topic, “sports” for example.

See some stuff they Stumbled, then message them about their Stumbles, offering your opinion on some of those topics, or just saying, “Nice Stumbles. Friended you,” if you’re lazy. (Actually friend them before saying that.)

I like messaging people more than reviewing their profiles, because messaging them doesn’t show up on your profile as recent activity, and if you have a lot of reviews of Stumbles on your profile instead of reviews of websites, you’re profile won’t look very interesting. Also, messages are more personal, so they seem to have a higher chance of getting people to friend you.

Add Me as a Friend

Add me as a friend here and I will reciprocate. There’s one add right there, and a good one. I like to Stumble sports stories I see, and I have a relatively large reach among my number of friends. It’s nice to have some highly friended people among your group of friends, because then if they Stumble it, it goes out to a large audience.

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Time to join ClickBooth to help monetize your site, don't you think?

Posted 4/14/08 - Kellex

Ok, so I got suckered into this damn Twitter thing. I'll give it a try but I can't promise I will be completely active on it...we'll see.

Anyway, add me up! Twitter me son!