Website: www.nflgridirongab.com

Interview With:  Matt Loede

When did you start NFL Gridiron Gab?

We kicked off in August of 2006…have been going strong ever since and have expanded our staff a lot over the last 8 months

What made you start it?

My business partner and I felt like we had enough connections through the media as well as our general love of football and the love of wanting to share our opinions.

What is your background?

I have been in the sports media for the last 13 years, I cover the Indians, Browns and Cavs, doing reports and updates for ESPN, Fox Sports, Westwood One, Sporting News and other outlets.  I have had a blast covering about 100+ games a year.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career?  What is your goal with this blog?

Both to be honest…If it can be a career, great…we are looking to expand our advertising this year, and really get more mainstream already with outlets that pick us up already.

What was your tipping point?  What put you on the map?

We started getting picked up by various national outlets – USA Today, Palm Beach Post, CNN/SI, NBC Blog Buzz..I think that gave us a lift as far as hits and what we were all about

What type of blogging software do you use?

We use Wordpress

How is your staff paid?

Right now we are not in a position where we are paying anyone on a regular basis, but if we get trades for gift cards, whatever, we share the wealth

How hard was it to recruit your staff?

Not really, we put out a couple of posts asking for interested writers, and then it’s grown with friends of them and people asking us to come on board.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

Right now it varies, but we usually make about $500-$1000 per month

If you could get something for free to help you out with your blog, what would it be? (Ex: design, marketing, ad optimization, etc)

Right now we really would like to get our site out there, so getting some ads out there for all to see would be great.

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

I think it’s only going to grow, and so far it’s been great to see things get bigger since even we’ve been around

STN’s Take,

Matt has a great thing going over at NFL Gridiron Gab.  It looks like his experience and contacts in the business have helped him to grow pretty fast along with his great writing.  We like that he has separated out each team into its own domain so people can just go to that website if they are just interested in team news.  His sites are designed very well and they are very easy on the eyes.

Overall his site does a great job but we do have a few minor suggestions.  We would like to see him promote his network more.  On the upper right sidebar we would like to see his team pages first.  There are a many team page links so we would like to see each division and then if someone clicked on the division, it would expand to show the teams in that division.  Our second suggestion since many of the articles are long is that we would like to see him excerpt some of his posts so he can fit more articles on the front page.  Our last suggestion is to create a logo or design a better header image that makes the brand NFL Gridiron Gab more noticeable.