Blogging is the on-court equivalent of drawing a charge against a sprinting 6'8", 250 lb. LeBron James: you will put in effort; you will get run over; and you may get hurt or embarrassed; but if you anticipate his movement, get in the right position and protect your family jewels, you will ultimately be rewarded.Now that I've scared off 90% of the basketball community, welcome to blogging!
Let's start with the last step first:
1) Protect your family jewels: Good blogging begins and ends with good listening--kind of like playing sound defense. If you don't listen to your teammates or your coach, you will run into a high ball screen one day from Cole Aldrich and you will get knocked flat on your a**; or you will be running more than you'd prefer in practice on any given day.
Listen.
Protecting your family jewels means wearing a jock strap on the court, and protecting your family name and blog/personal brand online. How do you do that? By setting up a 'listening station.' Here are a few tools you'll need that don't require opening your bank book:
Monitor Blogs:
Google Alerts - Alerts allow you to comprehensively monitor the web for any mentions of your blog and personal name (good or bad), keep tabs on your area of basketball (HS, college, pro, international), stay current on your competitors and get the latest news in the basketball space. You can subscribe for alerts via email or set up an RSS feed for the alerts to right to your reader. Here's some help with RSS/Google Reader set-up.
** If you fancy Yahoo or just want Google insurance, you can set up a similar search query with Yahoo alerts. Follow this 'how to' link.
IceRocket - Sometimes your brand/blog may slip through a Google halfcourt trap. Don't panic, IceRocket will rotate over to help out. And it's backed by Mark Cuban. Go to the site, type in a query for your name, your blog's name, and your blog's URL address (all separately). Then, be sure to subscribe via RSS with your reader.
Monitor Twitter:
TweetBeep - Whether or not you have a Twitter account, it's important to keep track of who's dropping your name, tweeting your website or blog and who's talking about your products or services. TweetBeep updates will be sent right to your email inbox.
Monitor Comments:
BackType - Find, follow, and share comments about your blog/brand.
Monitor Other Social Channels:
socialmention: Get real-time email updates on your choice of search phrases. Make sure you select 'all' under type.
Facebook public search: I covered this topic awhile ago. You can refer to it here.
Now that your family jewels are protected, let's think ahead.
2) Anticipating movement - I'm going to swap sports metaphors here for a second. Wayne Gretzky once said, "Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been." This rule is timeless and applies really well to drawing a charge on an offensive player in basketball and drawing attention to your site.
There's hundreds, if not thousands, of sites out there that cover the NBA and its 30 teams (I mentioned 200 of them here). Add that to the number of blogs that offer commentary and news on the college game, high school recruiting and youth basketball skill development, and it's easy to discern that the space is saturated.
You can stay high and dry by focusing on a niche within a niche. Take College Chalktalk for example. My good friend, Chris DiSano, leveraged his relationships and built a site that gives you inside the lines coverage straight from the horse's mouth. Over 60 Division I college coaches (from head to assistant level ) spanning 20+ conferences write for the site's National Coaches Diary Series. If Chris continues to add quality, unbiased journalists (through his partnerships with the famed Blue Ribbon and NetScouts) to complement insider access from these coaches, he's going to crush it--mostly because he anticipated movement of college basketball bloggers trying to get access to the coaches. He "gatejumped" the crowd and "made his own game."
3) Get in the right position - I was very lucky. I spent a lot of my time going off-blog to Twitter before the critical mass of basketball community members succumbed to micro-blogging. Shaq and Charlie Villanueva's presence informed my decision to get in the trenches, stay consistent and figure out how to use to Twitter to crowdsource for blog ideas, search for and participate in relevant conversations, and connect with like-minded people.
Then, one day St. John's came calling with this opportunity. When my name kept appearing in their Sports Information Director's "People You May Know" box on LinkedIn, Facebook and the like, he decided to check out my blog. He saw that it was about marketing and social media in basketball, and the rest is history.
Getting in the right position really means:
* Committing yourself to the task of building a successful blog
* Being consistent in your post frequency, style and voice
* Creating remarkable, compelling content worthy of backlinks, comments, positive mentions, subscriptions and monetization
* Covering a unique niche
* Having a professional blog design that exudes credibility
* Being useful, and of value
* Using titles and keywords effectively in your posts
* Building productive relationships with fellow basketball community members
* Leveraging social media tools to connect and get found
* Giving a lot more than you extract from the community
* Learning from your mistakes
* Being patient; success doesn't come overnight
If you're not up for the task, you can always just get out of the way. Tony Parker did:
What else? Please add your thoughts and comments below. They are very much welcomed and appreciated.
