Posted 6/27/08 - Kellex

If you were lacking on post ideas over the last couple of weeks you should have looked towards the NBA and its NBA Draft. Each sport has events that take place that just fuel the blog world and in order to create a top notch sports blog, you need to hit on these events and exploit the hell out of them.

The NBA Draft was the most recent, and just to give you an idea of its power, we'll throw up the top draft posts from BallHype so you can see how creative people can get.

• Hollywood NBA Lottery Mock Draft - The Money Shot

• OJ Mayo's NBA All-Food Team - NE Patriots Draft

• Top 10 NBA Players Not Drafted in the 1st Round - Hoop Doctors

• Ballads and Rhymes: Draft Previews in 30 Words - Daily Basketball

• NBA Wonderlic Test - Word of Isaac

• 25 Ways to Guarantee Yourself as a Bust - Le Basketbawl

• Frederic Weiss (Forgotten) 1st Rounders - Legend of Cecilio Guante

So you can see that the big time bloggers just eat up these events and you should be thinking about the next one. Is it the Olympics? Is it the upcoming NFL season? How about the baseball All-Star game? There are plenty of them out there that you should already be thinking about.

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

Posted 6/11/08 - Kellex

The first thing I'd like to do is acknowledge Dannie from Sports Blog Earnings and his positive look at BlogBurst while I was hating the hell out of it. BlogBurst ran an initial push back in April by recruiting any basketball blogs they could find that would be willing to join their network.

I jumped on the idea but after seeing nothing early on from it and the fact that they denied the Sports Dollar from it had me quickly forgetting about the service and moving on to other ideas.

So what happened?

Well sure enough, Dannie was right about its potential to put your blog posts on major sites and deliver some nice traffic. During these NBA Finals, I've been linked up to NBA.com on 2 of the 3 games and man, did Le Basketbawl feel the love! Not only was it linked up, but it was one of the top posts linked during the entire running/streaming game which obviously had thousands of visitors simultaneously checking the score for updates.

The first line in this image is the traffic that the BlogBurst post to NBA.com has delivered to me so far tonight for game 3 and the second line is from game 1 on 6/5. (I grabbed that 408 visitors number at 11PM PST and the traffic is still flowing in, so that number will look drastically different by now.)


Those may not seem like Deadspin or Big Lead numbers but they are the exact readers I am looking for to come to my NBA blog. These are die hard NBA fans that are following the game play-by-play online and also browsing around to the top blogs at the same time. Can you get any better than that? My Google Adsense sure loves BlogBurst! These numbers are also pulled from my Google Analytics which for whatever reason always recognizes far less visitors than my other stat trackers. (Anyone else notice that?)

How can you utilize BlogBurst?

Write a game preview! Write something buzzworthy! Don't swear (too much)! Here is the bullet list pulled from the BlogBurst site on how to get the "in's":

The more frequently you post, the more likely a publisher will be to find you. Minimum of one top-notch post a week.

Our publishers tell us that they are most interested in unique perspectives, make sure your blog offers a distinct voice. We don’t want novels, but we do want full-length essay-style posts with unique content.

Stay away from posts that just link and summarize content from other sites.

Spell-check, grammar-check, polish it up.

I'm guessing that BlogBurst has various outlets to post your work on other than game threads, but I have yet to hit their other criteria. As I become aware of more examples I will surely let you know.

Tell us Dannie!

I'll leave this post open for Dannie to possibly write about on his blog or respond via comment as to how he got linked up to the Chicago Sun Times. Was it a game preview of a Sixers-Bulls game or just an interesting piece on them?

For the rest of you, if you haven't already, you will want to sign up for BlogBurst and try to break their code to get some play on a major site; the results speak for themselves.



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Posted 5/27/08

Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog’s Sports Blogger Forums and AirRaid81 on StumbleUpon who would love to add you as a friend!

BlogRush Can Still Bring Decent Traffic if Used Properly

Alright guys, so many of you know about BlogRush and chances are if you know about BlogRush, the first thing you know about it is that is sucks. That is only partially true. BlogRush does suck in it’s default state, but if you make some modifications to the RSS feed, it came bring good traffic.

BlogRush, for those of you who don’t know about it, is a blog syndication service that puts a widget up on your site with links to related posts, and it will put your links up on the widget on other people’s sites if you add it to yours. You can sign up here: BlogRush

The problem is that it uses the default RSS feed of your blog to display the links and titles. That leads to terrible click-thru rates, because the title space is pretty small in BlogRush, and even if the titles fit, they won’t get many clicks unless they catch the reader’s attention with controversy or whatever.

Now, you don’t want to be writing BlogRush titles for your blog titles, because that would probably annoy the direct visitors to your blog. So, what’s a blogger to do to have good BlogRush titles and good organic titles?

Just modify your RSS feed. Here’s a hack for anyone who uses Wordpress to create a custom RSS feed for BlogRush that will display only your single best post and title:

Create a Microsoft Word or other text-editing file, and use this code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?> <rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Your Blog Title</title>
<link>http://www.your blog url.com</link>
<description>Your Blog's Description or Tagline</description>
<language>en-us</language>

<item>
<category>BlogRush</category>
<title>Featured Post Title</title> <link>http://yourblogurl.com/permalink to the post</link>
<description>
This description is not used by BlogRush.
</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Leave everything alone except the variables that are marked for your individual use.

Save the file as blogrushrss.rss or whateveryouwant.rss and then upload it to your ftp. This is only possible with Wordpress, unfortunately.

When it comes to your Featured Post Title, write something short and funny or interesting. That will get clicks. I had done some experimenting with this in the past, and some of my top titles were things like “Brett Favre is a Disgrace!” (in regards to his thoughts about unretiring) and “Mark Cuban was Right!” (about blogging and banning bloggers from his locker room).

Don’t expect 10% click thru rates to your blog. (Hell, don’t even expect 1%.) But, right now, most people are struggling just to get 0.1%. I’m getting 0.5%. With as many displays as BlogRush gives, that translates into 10-20 visitors a day for me. Consider this is free traffic. The traffic from all these sources adds up, and the more traffic you get, the more impressions you get. My impressions have been growing exponentially.

Do the same thing, and your hits will be growing exponentially as well.

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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!

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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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Posted 5/19/08

Guest post written by James of NE Patriots Draft, a site dedicated to the wonderful world of football and the incredible amount of coverage given to the NFL draft.


Maximizing your Sports Blog Traffic

NE Patriots Draft has been operating for exactly two months. During this time, as lead writer and designer for the site, I have learned quite a bit about obtaining traffic, both quality and quantity. During our first two months, we have had just over 25,000 unique visitors and 105,000 pageviews. 80% of our traffic comes from referring links, while 15% comes from search engines. Here are my three thoughts on how to receive more traffic.

Stay Focused

My website deals mainly with analyzing the NFL Draft, the Patriots, and Patriots personnel moves. On occasion, I'll write a humor or editorial piece, such as the article that won me a free trip to the Patriots/Chiefs opening day game, courtesy of Bleacher Report. These articles don't bring in returning visitors very often, and some of my regulars have commented that they find them a waste of their reading, as they come for NFL Draft and Patriots analysis. Variety is nice, but losing focus risks losing your regular readers.

Fill a Need

There are literally millions of blogs out there. Why should someone read yours? Quality content and a nice design sometimes isn't enough. Most sites that succeed provide a service that can't be received elsewhere or at least many other places. HailRedskins and Walter Football have superb Mock Draft Databases and the Sports Dollar has advice you can't get elsewhere. We had our Undrafted Free Agent list. We were sick of looking at disjointed snippets of UDFA information, so we collected all the info and with our own sources we are able to put together a pretty accurate list in no time. Thus, need filled. That one post got over 115 links and over 15,000 pageviews in a short amount of time.

Use the Right Social Bookmarking

At NE Patriots Draft we started off using Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious as our Social Bookmarking focus. If you look at the popular Digg pages you will rarely see something from a blog, and even rarer to see something from the sports world. Leave Digg to tech and politics. After two weeks and about 15 total hits, we decided that we needed to find something else. Yardbarker.com was found to be an excellent way to bring in more traffic (3,000+ UV) while Ballhype hasn't lived up to our expectations (900+ UV), although perhaps we need to give it more time.

Follow your voice, provide a service, and target the right audience, and you too can reach your traffic and exposure goals.

Check out NE Patriots Draft's most recent post on their 2009 Patriots Mock Draft Database.


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Posted 5/2/08 - Kellex

Daily Blog Tips just ran an article detailing Google search results and where in the page your blog is showing up for your particular keywords. We all strive to be on page #1 for our specific keywords but according to this article and some research done by Cornell University, that may not be good enough.

In fact, if you are not in the first 1-3 words, you may not be getting enough looks, clicks or anything for that matter. Once you drop past the 3rd keyword, your chances of being visited drop dramatically. To tell you the truth, if you are not the #1 spot, this data shows you really have no shot in hell of being clicked but I just find that hard to believe.

Here some screenies for our NBA blog, Le Basketbawl for 3 different sets of keywords that we work on. (click on them for bigger versions)

Keyword: nba basketball blog (page 1, position 2)

Keyword: basketball blog (page 2, position 2)

Keyword: nba blog (page 2, position 3)

As you can see we fair pretty well especially for the keywords “nba basketball blog”. We are sitting just behind the #1 NBA blog on the planet, TrueHoop and we’re ok with that for now. Also you notice for our other targeted keywords we are on the second page, but we are also sitting in the top 2-3 positions which according to this data ranks better than being in the 8th spot on the first page.

Anyone else have any data on this? Or perhaps you have some results that show the difference between your spot at the bottom or top of a search page?

This post brought to you by the PepperJAM Network and Review ME!

Posted 4/30/08 - Kellex

Is it really possible? It sure is! Our NBA blog, Le Basketbawl, just received its first Google PageRank today after the updates took place and Google stuck us with a 5! This is a very exciting time for us and we were wondering when all the hard work we put in would pay off. Well folks, today would be that day.

You’ll probably notice that the first post on the site was back in December of 2007 which may bring you to the question of “How the hell do you figure less than 2 months?” Well our blog started in December but the actual switch to the domain of lebasketbawl.com didn’t’ happen until 3/10/08. Basically when a blog switches domains, it is starting back at zero. (Our friends over at ReclinerGM.com know what I’m talking about.)

How did we manage this feat? Love your topic.

Le Basketbawl is definitely our baby. This was the first blog we started and will always remain our #1 priority as we’ve watched it grow without knowing a single thing about the blog world. When we started this blog back in December, we were looking to jump into the blog world to let our opinion out on the sport we’ve followed since we were children and to hopefully make a few dollars from it. Basketball truly is a passion to us, and I think it shows through the work we’ve put out there. So if you ask us the main reason we’ve seen success and received this PageRank, I’d have to attribute that to actually owning the topic of the blog and putting real ideas and love into it.

What else did we do? Content my friends.

I think you've all been drilled enough with "comment, comment, comment" and that's fine because we aren't going to tell you that we are comment pros. In fact, we rarely commented on other basketball blogs except the ones we had become friends with. What we spent most of our time on was writing great content. Many of our early posts hit the big time by making SI.com's Extra Mustard or Yahoo's Ball Don't Lie. (Ex: 60% of NBA Players are Broke After 5 Years) By making these heavily trafficked sites, we gained a ton of exposure that carried us through and onto this nice ranking with plenty of high ranked linkbacks from more than a few major sites.

And then...? Links and Blogrolls.

Being brand new to the blogging world, we didn't actually know what a PageRank was and how we were supposed to obtain one. We read the rumors on the effects of a blogroll killing your PR and then ignored them. Our blogroll is actually quite large and from what we know now, Google did not penalize us for it. We may have more outgoing links than SEO pros would ask for, but Google didn't seem to mind.

Our goal was to get every NBA blog out there to recognize that we were linking to them and hope they would return the favor. Since we decided we didn't have time to comment like crazy, we went with the link or blogroll method. We also ran a daily post titled "LINKBAWL" that was your regular old link list but still let other blogs out there know that we existed and we were reading their material.

Finally? Domain time!

We'll have to assume that the final switch to our own domain really impressed Google. We had lebasketbawl.blogspot.com for 3 full months and never saw a thing happen with our rank. Then we switched, and within 2 months we had a rank of 5! For a site the size of Le Basketbawl, and the fact that it was our first attempt at blogging, we must have made some pretty good moves.

Building a blog and achieving that decent PageRank is not rocket science people. These other money making, marketing, or SEO blogs will tell you it is, but I think we've just proven them wrong. If you really take the time to write great and meaningful content, you will be just fine.

Posted 4/20/08 - Kellex

I recently joined WickedFire to become more involved in the money making forum world and start to build some relationships and I came across a list one of the members had posted. It was a list of the best keyword tools out there. I've used a few of these but will definitely be checking out some more. You can never really do enough keyword research can you?

• KeyWord Discovery
• WordTracker Keywords
• NicheBOT
• Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Adwords keyword tool
• Google Trends
• Niche Taxi
• SEO Book's keyword tool
• Good Keywords

If you have any success or horror stories with any of these tools I'd love to hear them. Please check some of these out; having great keywords can be the savior to that little blog of yours.

And if you haven't joined WickedFire you should start thinking about it. Just be aware that it isn't your average Digital Point forum. This place is not for the weak.

Posted 4/16/08 - Kellex

Still looking to build linkbacks or traffic? Ever thought about a weekly link post?

We run DollarBall a couple of times a month just to let those other blogs out there know that we exist and we appreciate their work. We also run a link post called LINKBAWL over at our basketball blog that is dedicated to the hot basketball stories of the day or week. These are two examples you could use to start up your post.

Most bloggers just LOVE to get linked up by other blogs. It feeds their ego a little bit but also lets them know they have a reader. (Of course they really love linkbacks because it brings in traffic from that other blog.) Many blogs also try to thank others for the love they give and in most cases will attempt to link back to you.

Don’t feel the need to run this thing everyday! Many blogs do and I’m not actually sure how the hell they find the time to do this, but more power to them. (Make sure you can stick to some sort of schedule once you decide on a link post, because your readers will get used to the great info!)

Got a better way to get noticed in the blogging community than to link another blog? When you come up with one that is free, let me know!

Posted 4/15/08 - Kellex

What's going on! Today we would like to start out a new idea that we hope will grow into something very entertaining and educational to our readers by allowing them to participate in the content provided through the Sports Dollar.

The idea is pretty simple and should be a lot of fun. We want our readers who have anything to say about the sports blog world or make money online world to write "featured" posts for us that we can display for one week a month!

Basically we'll hold a "wannabe" contest to see who can come up with a great story, tip, review or whatever they want that has to do with either sports, sports blogging or making money online. (The "wannabe" part will be me approving the best of the best!) We'll take 5 of the articles and have a "featured" post each day for a week and we'll do this once a month. It will be a "Featured Post Week" or something of that sort. (The nifty name will come down the road.)

All articles should be at least 200 words and submitted by April 20th to make this month's featured week. The list of approved articles will be announced at the end of the day on the 20th with the schedule for the upcoming week.

If you have a great article that you wrote last week or last month, feel free to share that! This doesn't have to be absolutely brand new material, although you may want to update it.

This is a win-win situation for all parties! The Sports Dollar will be blessed with some great content from many other amazing writers out there, plus we can share links with each other to help build everyone's traffic and PageRank. (Of course make more money too!)

I know many of our readers want to know some of the best sports or money making blogs in the industry and this is a great way to let them know who you are!

If you are interested drop us a comment or send us an email!

Posted 4/14/08 - Kellex

Daily Blog Tips wrote an article today detailing the 8 Addicting Habits of Bloggers and they hit it right on the head with every single one. I find myself falling into these from time to time and have struggled to break some of them like a damn addiction! There was one that really stuck out to me though and that was Chasing Social Media Traffic.

I think we all know how great of a thing social media traffic can be especially if you have a story really take off and get a bunch of Hypes, Diggs or points. The traffic can flow and you can grab a ton of new readers that may stick with you for the long haul. The problem I have though is the excessive spam I’ve been noticing lately on every single one of them. It seems like every post someone writes these days, they feel needs to be thrown up and “shouted” on Digg or IM’d on BallHype. What’s the deal?

Do you all really think that the garbage you just wrote is going to blow up? It takes a really special piece of work to make the front page of Digg and quite a few linkbacks on BallHype to get anywhere. I know you may have just written something YOU feel is really great, but maybe you should ask another blogger to read it to see how they feel. Not everything is a winner!

Only your best work should be submitted to these sites and not just any old “link post” you just put together in 15 minutes. I myself used to post just about anything to these sites and found myself checking religiously to see if anyone had Dugg or Hyped my articles. It really became an obsession and then I started seeing my content lose quality and then the frustrations started to kick in. I also felt a little odd within the sports blogging community and realized it looks pretty lousy when you are constantly submitting your own stories even if it’s not all that great.

In recent weeks I’ve started focusing more on writing and only submitting if I really feel good about. Well sure enough, those articles I truly took time on have been pretty successful on many of the social media sites.

Make sure you are continuing to write quality articles! Your readers came to you because you wrote something that interested them; please don’t let early success distract you from the big picture.

And there is one last little rant I need to get out. For those of you who are submitting everything to Digg, BallHype, and YardBarker just to have your page indexed by Google, you are absolutely pathetic. You are basically telling us all that you are a horrible writer, have no interesting ideas and no one reads your work.

Posted 4/12/08 - Kellex


I've got to admit that I am a complete newbie when it comes to YardBarker. I had heard of it but for some reason had never taken the time to really use it or play with it or participate on it. Well those times have surely ended as of this past week!

I decided to finally start submitting content to YardBarker last week just to see what it could do. The numbers definitely do not lie and I am now slapping myself for not jumping on this thing earlier.

On Wednesday I wrote up an article on my basketball blog titled NBA Draft History: The White Boy Busts and thought it was decent enough to submit to some social bookmarking sites. It actually found 51 Diggs (not too bad) and only 12 Hypes through BallHype (This issue is another post in the making.). So overall, Digg brought in some traffic even though 51 is not enough to reach the main page and BallHype has been jacking me around lately and it only reached 12 there.

At this point I decided to throw it up on YardBarker just to see what might happen. Sure enough, the readers there loved it! Right now it is sitting at 43 points and 22 comments! It sat on the main page for at least a full day and hovered in the top few pages for another. 299 visits later to my little basketball blog and I'm not complaining!

These numbers aren't anywhere near what Digg could provide with a front page article but this definitely provided a nice boost to a slow Friday while I was out of town for work.

As a sports blogger, please don't wait as long as I did to use this great site but remember that YardBarker is not a social bookmarking tool for spam. The content you submit here should be your best or you'll be run right out! Some of the people that comment here are nasty and Pro athletes also blog here so make sure to keep it legit!

Posted 4/10/08 - Kellex

Here is a look at the top stories currently on BallHype and what you can take from them to help you build a better post and hopefully generate some much needed traffic.

1. 2008 NBA Blogger Season Awards: 42 Hypes, 16 linkbacks

2. South Park Crushes Bill Belichick: 33 Hypes, 14 linkbacks

3. Video - How do I reach these kids?: 17 Hypes, 13 linkbacks

4. The State of the West via Comic: 19 Hypes, 4 linkbacks

5. Video - Amare = Weak or Bowen = Dirty?: 21 Hypes, 8 linkbacks

(Those numbers will obviously jump now that we've linked them so by the time you read this, it may look a little off and of course others could enter those top 5 spots if they are hyped or linked.)

With just a quick glance what you can you gather from that list? Well there are 3 videos, a comic, and a blog community post.

I think it has been well documented that a great video will always get you some major traffic so I find it no surprise that 3 of the top 5 posts are videos. Ever thought about looking into the video making biz? Adding some breaking video to your site can get you instant and long term traffic as well as a ton of linkbacks. (Odenized is the best example of this to date.)

Another post is a comic strip about the NBA. This is brilliant but unless you are an artist and extremely creative this could be a little difficult. Although one thing to keep in mind is that linking to a post like this can get you a lot of exposure. You can always post this comic with a linkback to the original site followed by a post to Digg or Yardbarker. This may seem a little odd or shady, but it happens all the time. Most would just be happy that you are linking back to their work and I doubt in most cases you will get any negative feedback.

The final topic in the top 5 was a blog community awards post. This is something you should consider for your particular niche. I'm not sure how many niches out there are doing this sort of thing, but you can see the impact it can have. Not only will you get linked all over the place, but that traffic should just start flowing in.

As a new blogger, this would also be a great way to make some quick friends in your niche. Remember that building up a community should be one of your top 5 goals. What is your blog without a community to share it in?

Posted 4/10/08 - Kellex

One possibility you may have once your blog becomes successful is the option of selling it. It seems a little odd that you could sell a blog to someone and then the next day start up a new one doesn't it? Well people do it all the time!

Yesterday John Cow wrote up a piece on "How much is your blog worth?" and then today wrote a sort of "part 2" to that by announcing that John Cow dot com is up for sale. In the initial post he goes into detail on how you can actually sell a blog and also how to figure out how much it is worth. (Sorry not posting our numbers at this time.) :)

In the future, this may be something to think about if you have a very unique domain name or you have steady traffic numbers. John Cow dot com is sitting at around 1600+ subscribers while averaging 40k unique visitors per month. Now those numbers are great but don't compare to some of the larger sites like Shoemoney.com.

Sites like this or this will help you sell your blog.

As your blog continues to grow, hopefully with our help and many other sites, selling is an option to keep in mind.

Posted 4/9/08 - Kellex

Sounds a little crazy? Well the blog world has decided that May 1st will become the official RSS Awareness Day! (Info courtesy of Daily Blog Tips)

The goal is to give enough attention to the internet world that more people start to use it. It seems that a very low percentage of internet users even know what RSS is or what an RSS reader is. This is somewhat sad especially since they are so freakin’ handy!

The objective is to get as many bloggers and websites talking about RSS Awareness Day that the general public and media will figure out how useful it is and take advantage of it.

Here is a list of resources to give to your viewers:

•Wikipedia entry for RSS
•What is RSS?
•RSS In Simple English (Video)

If you visit Daily Blog Tips they have some options for prizes if you are involved, plus some nifty little banners to use like the one I have up at the top.