How can I drive traffic to my new sports blog?

September 25, 2009 5:23 PM

Another questions about driving traffic to a new blog - but this one is specifically about a sports blog.

I have gotten some very good ideas from previous threads, but I'm hoping I can elicit some suggestions that are specific to a sports blog. I have recently begun blogging about baseball, usually about the Oakland A's and San Francisco Giants (site is linked to in my profile), and I'm wondering about ways to drive traffic.

I am a regular at a few related sites, like Athletics Nation, McCovey Chronicles, Fangraphs, and Joe Posnanski's Blog, and have begun to plug the blog in places like my signature and such (as well as re-posting an entry as a fanpost a time or two). I have made a few facebook announcements, and told friends who have interest in this sort of thing. But I'm at a loss as to other ways of getting the word out.

If it helps, the blog is general musings about the A's and Giants and baseball in general (and occasionally other sports), where I am informed by sabermetric/modern statistical thinking but don't go too deeply into analysis - rather, I try to made it funny and chatty and readable for those aren't as interested in that sort of thing but still appealing to those who do. It'll be most interesting to A's and Giants fans, methinks.

Thanks for any advice! And don't be afraid to be brutally honest... I have no expectations of success, only tempered hopes.

posted by ORthey to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

Best answer: I have completely stopped blogging and I don't watch sports - I don't know very much about baseball. So, take my advice with a tablespoon of salt. However, when I was blogging regularly, I could grab 50k-100k views per post by doing these things on my blog:

1. Write articles that will interest far more people than your target audience of A's and Giants fans. You should cast a wide net at the outset to grab as many regulars as you can. I'm not saying that you should avoid writing about these two teams. Just make sure that if someone doesn't like these teams, you've offered those readers something.

2. Make outlandish statements and back them up. If you write something you believe that angers half your readers, that's a good thing. Possible post title: "Why the Oakland A's Don't Deserve a Pennant This Year"

3. Top 10 Lists are a COMPLETE and total cop-out, but they work and they're easy to write. Examples: "Top 10 Reasons the A's Will be Even Stronger in 2010" "The Top 10 Most Important Statistics in Baseball". Don't do it often and if you do, maybe re-invent the "top 10 list" with posts like: "The Ultimate Oakland A's Dream Team" with a list of players made up of past and present A's.

4. Include tech where it makes sense. Your readers are on a computer, using the internet. You've got a pretty good chance that they are not just sports fans. Also, these types of articles stand a much better chance of getting traction on news aggregator sites like Reddit and Digg. Possible posts: "iPhone Apps that Giants Fans Can't Live Without" "My Favorite Apps for Crunching Stats"

5. Pictures. Don't even think of writing a long-winding post without breaking up paragraphs with relevant pictures and infographics with captions. Also, make sure you break up long paragraphs. No one wants to read a giant block of text, no matter how well-written.

6. The best way to get traffic from a competing blog is with trackbacks. I would avoid posting your website's URL in the comments on another person's blog. That's spammy. You'll do far better by reacting to someone else's post on your own blog and linking back to their article in your response article. If you're running Wordpress or something similar, trackbacks happen automatically.

7. Do something stupid/unexpected and then write about it. Stupid: Make a Nightmare Team filling each position with the worst possible players in baseball and write why this person deserves to be on this Nightmare Team. You could make it a Giants Nightmare Team. Stupid: Write about which team's mascot would win in a fight. Stupid: Play a prank with Twitter. Write something incendiary, copy and paste it as a response to all the A's/Giants on Twitter and then write an article about the responses you received. Unexpected: Live blog from a boat in the water near where they catch the homerun balls at AT&T Park.

I'll post more if I think of anything else that might help.
posted by plasticbugs at 7:40 PM on September 25, 2009 [5 favorites]

Crap, long-winding should have been "long-winded".
posted by plasticbugs at 7:42 PM on September 25, 2009

Response by poster: Great advice, plasticbugs. Thanks a ton.
posted by ORthey at 8:13 PM on September 25, 2009

Use ping sites like iPings.com, obviously use Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. Place HITs on Mechanical Turk and have workers social bookmark the site, leave comments, and if you have ads, have them click on one of them as well.
posted by VC Drake at 12:39 PM on October 1, 2009