The importance of blogs and blogging has been discussed quite often. You can build an online presence, create a steady stream of content, increase findability… blah, blah, blah right?
Blogging can also lead you to your dream job. Don’t believe me? Then take it from someone who is living it.
Before jumping in to the series of questions below, allow me to introduce you to Crag Calcaterra. Craig writes the blog HardballTalk at NBC Sports.com, he blogs about baseball…for a living.
Craig, is also an old friend. For a period of time growing up, we were classmates, played Little League together and traded baseball cards from time to time. (Craig, you never responded to my Moose Haas for Rickey Henderson rookie request!).
While our life-paths took different directions, we were reconnected as adults through social media. It has been great getting back in touch, and well, his story is compelling, valuable and worth sharing.
For those of you that have read “Crush It”, I would like to introduce you to someone that is literally “Crushing It”. Enjoy.
Pat: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, and then tell us what you are now doing?
Craig: I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Beckley in 1991. I went to college at Ohio State where I majored in political science, graduating in 1995. From there I went on to the George Washington University Law School, where I received my J.D. in 1998.
For 10 years I was a civil litigator at various law firms in Columbus, Ohio, and for one year I was an Assistant Attorney General for the Ohio Attorney General’s office.
I began a baseball blog — ShysterBall — in 2007, which began as a part time thing. I grew more serious about it over time and at the end of 2009 I was offered a full time with NBC Sports.com, where I maintain the HardballTalk blog.
Pat: How did you begin blogging? What challenges did you face in getting started?
Craig: It was an impulsive thing, really.
One Sunday afternoon I just happened to be reading a newspaper’s website when I came across a baseball column I disagreed with. I wanted to complain to someone about it but there was no one in the house who particularly cared about baseball besides me, so I just set up a Blogspot account and pounded out a couple of paragraphs.
I’ve been complaining like that — more or less — for about three years now.
The biggest challenge at first was simply finding time to write. Between my legal practice and two children under the age of four there wasn’t a lot of free time. It was around then that I transformed from a night person to a morning person and began forcing myself to wake up at around 5:30 AM each day to write. I still do that even though I probably don’t really need to.
Pat: Do you have a specific strategy? Do you have a specific schedule that you stick to? Do you worry about SEO (search engine optimization) or analytics?
Craig: During the baseball season I start each day with a recap of the previous night’s games, but beyond that I sort of let the news take me wherever it wants to go.
To the extent I have a strategy it’s less content-based than scheduled-based. I try to get new posts up every half hour or so from around 8AM until 5PM or so, Monday through Friday. I probably don’t need to post as often as I do these days, but when I first got started, a high posting frequency was a way to separate myself from better-known writers.
Just like waking up early, posting frequently just became a habit and now I get the shakes if I don’t have new content up on a regular basis.
I never paid that much attention to SEO when it was just my own site. Now that I’m with NBC page views are obviously more important, but I still really don’t think too hard about that stuff. My headline writing has changed slightly. I think a little bit more about enticing people with the headlines now, whereas before I’d use little puns or in-jokes that amused me. Beyond that the NBC people make a point to place links to my posts on the NBC Sports front page and, occasionally, at sister-site MSNBC.com, but my mandate is to essentially write interesting things and let others worry about wrangling the traffic.
Pat: What is your process for constructing a post?
Craig: The vast majority of what I write is reacting to things in the news or things that occur during baseball games, and for that stuff I simply begin writing. Longer posts or posts dealing with more serious issues — my writing about performing enhancing drugs, things about race and deeper historical posts come to mind — generally start out with an informal outline.
Oftentimes, however, I end up chucking the outline anyway and going off in unforeseen directions. Which is fine, because ultimately the appeal of a blog post is its immediacy and the sharpness of the opinion that animates it. I try to keep it coherent of course, but at the end of the day I want my writing to sound more like the beginning of a conversation or, sometimes, an argument, not an essay.
Pat: What have been the benefits of blogging? Would you call this your dream job?
Craig: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, and there are still mornings I wake up and panic for a moment, worrying that I’ve just been dreaming all of this.
So yes, this is absolutely my dream job.
As for benefits, I’m typing these answers from a hotel room in Florida where I’ve been sent to cover spring training, so that’s nice. The biggest benefit, however, is that for the 51 weeks a year I’m not covering spring training I work from home. I feed my kids breakfast every morning, make their lunches, put them on the school bus and I’m there when they get home. I took a fairly major pay cut to leave the law and become a blogger, but my life is much, much richer now than it used to be.
Pat: What tips or advice would you give to those starting a blog?
Craig: Only blog about something for which you truly have a passion.
Building a successful blog requires regular posting at regular intervals, essentially forever. If you lose interest in your topic you won’t post, and if you don’t post your blog will die because readers have an almost infinite number of alternatives and won’t waste their time coming back every day to check and see if you’ve decided to post something that day.
I think the best test for whether or not you’ve picked a topic you’ll stick with is whether you’d still care and still write about the topic if no one but you ever read it.
Pat: What are some pitfalls for bloggers to avoid?
Craig: The biggest is simply choosing the wrong topic as discussed above. Other mistakes include pulling stunts to attract traffic such as trying to pick a fight with a more trafficked blog in order to get attention, spamming other blogs or message boards with links back to their own blog and other things of that nature, which ultimately alienates readers (and other bloggers who may have otherwise linked to you on their own). Attracting traffic takes time, and a blogger needs to be patient and persistent if they want to build a truly reliable community of readers.
Ultimately, if you care about your topic, write often, and deliver sharp, informed opinions, the readers will find you.
