Sports Blogging and becoming a better Blogger

Sports blogging (I run a football (soccer) blog, in case you’re interested) is a difficult business - being opinionated can work against you, you get thrashed from all ends and the people who like what you do rarely speak up (mainly because the people you’re pissing off - you’ll always piss people off - are so vocal they drown everything else out).

In some ways I’ve found sports blogging to be the litmus test for defining yourself as a writer and as a blogger. Can you handle the criticism? Can you bridge gaps and bring together opposing viewpoints to foster an intelligent debate (when everyone’s first instinct is to call you a f’n w**ker)? How do you monetize a niche that’s not as lucrative as, say, celebrities / pop culture? How do you build links in a niche where everyone wants to hoard links and traffic?

Not all sports blogging is painful though - in most cases bloggers tend to follow the teams they support and write exclusively about them. This is the safest route to be a micro blogging celebrity - pick a team to follow and write something positive and insightful every day (it’s easy to fake both) - and within weeks you’ll have a core audience of enthusiastic fans whom you’ve touched on an emotional level and will praise you and support you for all they are worth (not much, but the ego boost is tremendous).

If you’re running a general sports blog though, then god help you. What some would take as a difference of opinion (bloggers need SEO vs bloggers don’t need SEO) turns into personal vendetta and a mob of pissed off fans are worse than any hate-bait you might have seen in the blogging arena.

Still, I find it to be a learning experience, something that can help you rather than hurt you. I admit that there was a time when it brought me down, but once you learn to roll with the punches and focus on improving yourself instead of responding to the criticism, it can be an enlightening experience.

If you want a crash course in blogging and especially all the issues that surround blogging, considering blogging for an year on sports (or anything else that can get readers to react strongly on a basic emotional level at the expense of their reason). You may not make a lot of money (unless you build a great site and sell it off - I figure you can make at least $20-30k from such a sale if you work hard), but you will definitely learn a lot, more than if you kept blogging about PSPs or weight loss for the next 5 years.

And if you’re already a sports blogger, here are some tips for making it a smoother ride:

• Have a standing comments policy that you should apply without fail. Delete comments that don’t follow it. Not only is it your blog and therefore your decision on what goes on it (freedom of speech is overrated), but if a nasty comment is going to ruin your day, you can delete in 5 seconds and forget about it.
• Respond to criticism calmly and try to improve yourself - Some people will take the time to tear your blog posts apart logically and you should use this opportunity as a chance to figure out what the problem is and how you can fix it. If you’ve made a mistake, don’t repeat it in the future. On the other hand, if you’ve got a troll on your blog who just crticises everything, ban them and save your time.
• Back up your opinions with sound reasoning and facts - you can get away with making sweeping statements elsewhere but sports fans take things way too personally and you need to make a full argument.
• If you take the piss too many times without being very funny, the backlash will be far worse than the fun you get out of doing it.
• Give your readers every opportunity to communicate - do discussion topics, encourage debate and learn to build conversations on your blog. The community is the most important aspect of sports blogging and if you ignore that, you can’t be successful.
• Be quick with the news - being first matters far more than being right. Get the news out and correct it later on. You will build a lot of goodwill and gain trust if you can regularly be the first with the news.
• Pageviews are your friends - work hard on your search engine marketing and site promotion and build up your pageview count. Yes, subscribers and regular readers matter but quite often in blogging we tend to ignore the factors that attract advertisers - namely, pageviews.

On a last note, a big thanks to Kevin for inviting me to blog here and hopefully you guys will be seeing more of me (with some solid SEO tips) next week.