10 Questions with Mitchell of Juiced Sports Blog

1. Describe your blog in five sentences or less.
It’s a sports blog with three writers who all try to be funny. I try to be controversial as well, and some of my posts like “Virginia Tech: Not America’s Team” have really pissed some people off, but that’s just from me expressing my opinion. We try not to do the same damn thing as every other sports blog, so a lot of the posts are “out there.” I often mix sports with politics, for example.

2. Link us to one post from your blog that best defines who you are.
Here’s the Virginia Tech post: Stop Supporting Those Trendy Causes. I was sick of ESPN commentators talking about how VT’s football team needed to win to rebuild the school. The massacre was terrible, but it had nothing to do with sports! Even worse, VT was playing LSU, a team that ESPN crowned “America’s Team,” after Katrina, and New Orleans was still in bad shape, so wouldn’t LSU still need to win to rebuild LSU? According to ESPN, anyway. Unfortunately, the comments didn’t get imported when I moved from Blogger to Wordpress.

3. What sets you apart from other bloggers?
Just look at the post above. Not many other bloggers would write that even if they thought it. Also, that post is pretty long. All of our posts are longer than regular blog posts. I don’t like reading a 2 paragraph post that just links back to a news story, and I think my readers would like more as well. That’s why JSB writes long and original content.

4. When and how did you first discover blogging?
When I was like 13, five years ago, I read Maddox.xmission.com and thought he was hilarious, so I decided to start my own blog and found Blogger. I didn’t update it very often, but then I started writing sports for various websites, then I started my sports blog last year when the fantasy football site that paid me went under. I saw that you could make money from a blog through John Chow, so then I started my own blog.

5. What is your biggest pet peeve related to blogging or the internet?
Blogs that don’t add value. Often you will see a blog that has one or two paragraphs about a big story that everyone is already talking about then it will just link to the news source. Great, I already know about that story. I got into the blogging biz to entertain my readers and give them something to think about. I hope that each post they read is worth their time.

6. Name one plugin, blogging widget, or service that you can’t live
without.
Is StumbleUpon a service? They offer the best quality visitors of any social media site. Their visitors stay longer and view more pages than average visitors, and the traffic continues coming forever, though it dies down after a few days of Stumbling.

7. If you could choose anyone, living or dead, to write a guest post for your blog, who would it be and why?
Frank Deford. He went into journalism writing news but then he started doing a lot of sports writing when he started writing for Sports Illustrated. He comes from a better time when journalism had values. Sports writers traveled with the team and respected the athletes. They wouldn’t take a single quote and twist it out of context for instant gratification.

8. How has blogging made you a better person?
It has taught me a lot about marketing and promoting. Not sure how that makes me a “better person,” but it is good experience for future jobs or whatever I end up doing. I don’t think blogging has made me a “better person,” I just try to be as good of a person as I can be day in and day out.

9. What are your tips for becoming a better blogger?
Unfortunately, it is not always true that content is king. Marketing is king. You can have the best content, but if no one knows you have it, you won’t build readers. It’s like if John Chow writes a post on the side of a tree in the forest, will anyone read it? Well, now that I invoke John Chow, now, he doesn’t have good content either, does he? He used to.

10. Name one great blog that you read on a regular basis. What makes it
unique?
Mixed Market Arts with Colin LaHay. It’s another make money blog, but LaHay is young, and his blog is new, so he still has good content. He doesn’t update every day, but that means that when he does update he usually has good content. For example, he has found a lot of places to build links that I haven’t heard of anywhere else.

Categories: Sports, Ten Questions