Welcome to the second edition of our Top 50 Sports Blogs!  You may notice some changes this time around and we hope that these changes mean a more rounded and well represented ranking system.  We took feedback from our last and applied some of it by choosing to go with Google’s new Ad Planner over Alexa.

Ad Planner provides the number of unique visitors a site receives per month, so we took that and threw it into our amazingly-complex-statistically-guru’d ranking scale and came up with a new 1-10 scale to fit our other ranking systems.

The other major change you’ll notice is the removal of all major blogs affiliated with a major news site such as ESPN, the Boston Globe, Yahoo, etc.  The stats for these blogs aren’t as easy to come by and are typically inflated while they leach off of their parents.

This new look definitely opened the door for some smaller blogs to jump in the top 50, and that’s the way we plan on keeping it!  We had these bad boys almost ready to go last week and then PageRanks were updated so we found it only fitting to wait and redo.

Oh, and here are the 1st Quarter Rankings…

Enjoy!

#1	Deadspin	7	10	10	10	37
#2	ProFootballTalk.com	6	10	10	8	34
#3	The Big Lead	6	7	10	10	33
#4	SPORTSbyBROOKS	6	7	10	9	32
#5	MLBTradeRumors.com	6	9	8	9	32
#6	Fire Joe Morgan	6	5	6	9	28
#7	Baseball Prospectus	6	8	8	9	26
#8	EDSBS	6	4	9	7	26
#9	Busted Coverage	6	7	8	5	26
#10	Kissing Suzy Kolber	5	5	9	6	25
#11	Awful Announcing	3	2	10	9	24
#12	The Sports Hernia Blog	5	7	8	4	24
#13	Draft Express	5	9	10	0	24
#14	Joe Posnanski	6	3	8	6	23
#15	The700Level.com	4	4	9	6	23
#16	The Hardball Times	3	4	7	8	22
#17	38 Pitches	7	3	5	7	22
#18	Bugs & Cranks	3	4	9	6	22
#19	LoHud Yankees Blog	6	4	7	5	22
#20	Home Run Derby	5	4	9	4	22
#21	With Leather	0	4	8	9	21
#22	Baseball Musings	4	3	8	6	21
#23	Mr. Irrelevant	6	2	9	4	21
#24	Baseball Think Factory	4	10	3	4	21
#25	Slam Online	6	4	6	4	20
#26	on 205th magazine	5	5	4	5	19
#27	Can’t Stop The Bleeding	6	2	7	4	19
#28	Deuce of Davenport	6	4	6	3	19
#29	The Wizard of Odds	6	2	6	4	18
#30	MetsBlog.com	3	5	3	6	17
#31	Larry Brown Sports	3	3	7	4	17
#32	Hugging Harold Reynolds	5	2	7	3	17
#33	Dan Shanoff	6	2	6	3	17
#34	It Might Be Dangerous…	5	2	7	3	17
#35	Tirico Suave	5	3	7	2	17
#36	U.S.S. Mariner	6	3	3	4	16
#37	freedarko.com	6	2	4	4	16
#38	Epic Carnival	5	2	6	3	16
#39	Hardwood Paroxysm	6	2	5	2	16
#40	You Been Blinded	0	3	7	5	15
#41	james mirtle	4	2	5	4	15
#42	Sox & Dawgs	5	2	5	3	15
#43	Walkoff Walk	5	2	6	2	15
#44	WhatIfSports.com	6	6	3	0	15
#45	KK Hockey	5	2	3	4	14
#46	Basketbawful	5	2	4	3	14
#47	mgoblog	4	2	5	3	14
#48	WaitingForNextYear	5	2	5	2	14
#49	Blog of Chris Cooley	5	2	5	2	14
#50	Ladies…	6	2	2	3	13

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Mitchell Blatt, owner of Juiced Sports Blog, which can be bought for $80,000, and Stumbler who can be added here.

24 Year Old Male Seeking Playful Sports Blog…

Okay, so now that you know how to increase the value of your blog, you’re going to need to find somewhere to sell it.

There’s a lot of sites that you can post your site for sale at but there’s only a few that you should worry about:

Site Point
Digital Point

Site Point

You have to pay to list your site on Site Point. If you are selling it for over $10,000, you have to list it as a premium website for $40. Otherwise, you have to pay $20. You can also sell a lot of other stuff there relating to websites for various costs. It’s worth the cost because it’s the most trafficked site relating to selling sites. You can set up an auction or sell it for a fixed price. You may make more money with an auction, but auctions are also legally binding, so if you aren’t getting high enough offers, it would be hard to pull it off the marketplace. People have done it in the past but it has caused controversy at Site Point.

Digital Point

You can list your site for free here, and the process is a lot more informal. There is no legally binding contracts, and you can run the sale however you want, but there is also more chance of being scammed because the site isn’t policed as well as Site Point.

A few others just to get more people looking at your site:

Bloggeries  – Bloggeries is the top blog forum on the net, but you won’t get much action here. It has nothing on Site Point and Digital Point.

DN Scoop – DN Scoop is the site that overvalues sites, so you could mention how much DN Scoop valued your site at, and maybe some ignorant fool will believe it and buy it for that much.

Since most sports bloggers don’t frequent any of those sites very often, you might not draw a whole lot of interest. You should also email some of your sports blogging friends to see if they’re interested. And if your sports blog is popular enough, like Free Darko or TBL or something, you could probably email Deadspin and other blogs and get them to link and talk about how you’re selling.

What to List When Selling Your Blog

Give out every details that will help you sell your blog.

• PR
• Links (if you have a lot)
• Pages indexed (every blog has a lot)
• Traffic (Whatever truth about your traffic sounds best. Like if you had a ton last month, list how much and show a screenshot, but you don’t have to list how much you had the month before. Also, mention how many pageviews, not uniques, you had when it comes to hits, but if you had a lot of uniques, mention that as well.)
• Stuff you’re giving away along with the blog
• How much money you make per month (Again, mention whatever makes it seem like you have more.)
• Where the traffic comes from
• Where the money comes from (people are going to ask you about that no matter what, so just get it out of the way and list it)

Put some html formatting and stuff to highlight the good parts. Here’s an example from SitePoint: Car-Depo

There you go. Now that I’ve given some advice on selling your blog, you owe me a commission, Kellex.

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I couldn’t help myself…sorry, so unrelated but this ridiculous lion thing is everywhere.

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So some of you may have noticed it has been awhile since I posted here. The simple fact here is I let outside forces mess up my daily work schedule. Basically I let stuff make the schedule instead of me making my schedule.

Bloggers can learn a very important lesson from this; do not let stuff or other commitments deter you from what it is you would want to be doing. We all have many things that take our time away, but to be successful bloggers we must find time each day to sit and write if only a few paragraphs.

Over the last few weeks I have started a new semester at school, traveled to three different NASCAR tracks, taken my son to his first baseball game, and tried to get outside and enjoy some of the summer. All of that has taken away from writing, and while those other things are extremely important, writing is what I do and I need to find a way to insure all of my commitments are being met.

For me the best strategy is to have a solid time each day where I do different things. As many of you know from reading this I write at least two articles a day and try, try, try to write something in a personal blog as well. Some of these days are easy; some are a little bit harder. For those that are curious, this is what a typical week looks like for me on the writing side.

Mondays are the easiest days, but for me the most nerve racking. I spend Monday mornings going over the stats from the weekend’s 3-5 NASCAR races. For each race I have an index card where I write down all the important facts I want to remember for the next race there. Generally this takes about two hours or so.

It is important for me to know not just the news but the actual results of NASCAR stuff for my role as a fantasy racing expert at www.fantasyinsideronline.com. While going through that I look up the stats for my pick that week. Last Week I picked Kyle Busch, who finished 15th not a horrible pick but he never ran higher then 9th so not a good pick either. My gut told me all week I should have gone with Carl Edwards and as it turns out he was 2nd. The lesson here is always trust your gut.

After pouring over stats from that week, I move to stats for whatever tracks are coming up on the schedule. Then I make my fantasy picks and my top 12 power rankings for the week. If all is well it is around noon and time for lunch.

Tuesdays tend to be a little tougher then Mondays. Generally speaking I write my post here on Tuesday mornings and I have an opinion NASCAR column due. I also have a Sports business piece due for my new job and starting in September I will have an additional NASCAR opinion piece due for a new project I cannot announce yet but details will be coming.

Wednesday is the easiest for me, just one Sports business piece to do and not NASCAR at all. This is my rest day. Thursdays are much the same but I tend to find myself glued to my Sirius waiting for announcements on NASCAR’s silly season. I try to write a really nice piece for my NASCAR blog this day as well, but lately news has not been breaking until Friday.

Friday is fun day, usually NASCAR all day from early in the morning to late at night after a truck race; it more then drives my wife crazy. I write a Truck series piece in the morning and attempt to write another NASCAR blog entry in the afternoon when I hear something cool going on. I also write a sports business piece and try not to take another invitation to go and cover a track in person. Lately I have been receiving a lot of requests to visit tracks and cover their events.

Now I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but mix in a full time school schedule, and since my wife works most of the time I have my son here, and there is always an abundance of house work that needs to be done and one can see my need to have a firm schedule in place to get it all done.

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Daniel over at one of our favorite blogs, Daily Blog Tips, has been running “Blogging Idol” which is his take on a blogging competition with the goal to see which participant can increase their RSS subscribers the most during a certain amount of time.

I have to admit that I haven’t been following this contest as closely as maybe I should be, but I have been following enough to realize that some of these people are spilling the beans on their RSS building methods.  With the goal being to raise your subscription levels, part of the contest asks each contestant each week what methods they used to get newbies to sign up to their feed.

Some of their explanations are pretty obvious, but each week I’ve seen a couple of bloggers using some interesting tactics that I hadn’t thought of before.  Of course I haven’t implemented any at this point since I just went through that whole sale deal, but in the near future I definitely plan to take what these people are offering up for…FREE.

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I booked my first Performancing Ad already!  And then cancelled it the next day…

Yeah, so their support department still hasn’t responded to my request to see if there is a work-around to get Blogger users into the mix since right now the Blogger platform does not appear to be supported.

Anyone else signed up for the program and been able to use it?  If so, have you sold any spots yet?

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We just ran a post looking at the annoying things that blogs tend to do and that happened to spark our big wonderful brains into another laughable idea! 

As bloggers, we sort of do some pretty weird things with our blogs that we either think will generate us some traffic, buzz or seriously, who knows what right?  We definitely do some whacky things though and those whacky things are what this post is dedicated to!

It’s pretty sad that we were able to come up with 13, but the truth there is you can probably come up with a lot more than 13…

1.  We trust every single new affiliate or ad merchant with our social security numbers!

2.  We spend 30-45 minutes a day dropping “cards” on blogs that have basically no relevance to our blog which we’ve put thousands upon thousands of hours into.

3.  We take the word of John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker, and Darren Rowse as instant money making gospel.

4.  We actually think that in just 6 months, we can be making $30K per month!  

5.  We spend hours a day talking about the power of Google and think that it’s socially acceptable.

6.  We think that making the front page of certain sites will turn us into millionaires!

7.  We spend actual money on things called “EC’s” that are worth nothing.

8.  We enjoy attending dozens of large conferences while everyone else on the planet hates them.

9.  We listen to a guy that doesn’t know what the MGM Grand is.

10. We give away worthless ebooks of our friends that we overvalue at thousands of dollars to build hype for a contest.

11. We spend years building social networks with people that we have never actually met in person.

12.  We brag about how great our lives are with no bosses or set schedules yet we spend 18 hours a day on the internet with ourselves.

13.  We make lists of anything on the planet we can think of, no matter how absurd they are.

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This new supposed internet sensation has just gone “alpha” meaning they are allowing only invites and special request accounts.  So if you are wondering what 12seconds.tv is, you aren’t the only one!

The site is basically a Youtube on 12 seconds of crack.  The site allows you to post 12 second videos to either tell a joke, update your life, update your site or whatever the hell you want really.  But like I just said, you have to do it in 12 seconds.

There is almost no chance in hell that I will use this service, but I was unfortunate fortunate enough to get an invite which also gives me the power to invite other users to it.  As a member of this alpha version I have 10 invites to give out to my loyal and lovable readers!

So who wants one?  This could be a pretty cool service if you are into that whole voyeuristic video thing, right?  Let me know and I’ll hook you up!  All I need is an email address to send the invite to.

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Sweeten the Deal, Make More Money

As I said in part one, selling a blog is hard because of the time investment required to run a blog. Since people need to update every day and market their posts, those factors will decrease profit margins and asking price. The trick to making money on the internet is automating the process. So if you want to sell your blog for a higher price (or if you just want to make more money on your own blog), you need to have some automated processes that you can package with your blog. If buyers see they can make money easily, they will pay more.

Here are some items to throw in with your blog to increase value:

Mailing List

With a blog, you have to get hits everyday. With a mailing list, you already have a list of people you can send to whenever you want, and most won’t unsubscribe. Before you go about selling your blog, you could spend the weeks or months before building a mailing list. You would have to sign up for AWeber, the best email list program, for $19/month at the cheapest. Put a sign up square on your site. Try to think of some incentive to give to email subscribers, perhaps an ebook or a piece of sports memorabilia to a winner. It doesn’t even matter if the email list is actually related to your blog’s topic. John Cow created an email list unrelated to gaming when he sold his gaming blog in his Cowpetition. Do the email list on whatever topic you want, if you are unethical, and promote it elsewhere, in forums, etc. Most buyers aren’t going to ask questions about the list, they will just assume it’s focused on sports. Throw in the email list with the blog when selling.

Forums

The great thing about forums is you don’t have to do any work, and you make money. A lot of money, too; each time someone posts, that takes about three pageviews, and, they will usually post multiple times each visit, so they are great for CPM advertising. The main problem is that it takes a lot of work to get forums active. (I can give you a detailed article about forums later.) You have to post a lot yourself and get other people posting, and no one wants to post in an empty forum. Even if a ton of people aren’t posting though, you can still make a little bit of money, though; you don’t really lose money from not having people post.

Yardbarker, Ballhype User Profiles

One of the easiest ways to build traffic to posts is social media sites. If you buy a blog, especially a niche blog, like a sports blog, you’re going to need a way to build traffic. If you don’t already have a Ballhype profile, it’s going to be hard to build your profile. Or, even if you do, another profile will always help, giving you a head start when posting. If you’re selling a sports blog and you don’t plan to start another sports blog, you might as well throw in your Yardbarker and Ballhype profiles into the deal.

These are just a few of the things you can add to your blog deal to make more money. Anything that makes earning money automatic will earn you more money and increase value.

Part 3 is on actually finding someone who will want to buy.

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