Website: The Sports Dollar

Interview With: Kellex Barr

When did you start your blog?

Mid March was the beginning of the Sports Dollar’s hopeful reign over the sports blogging world!

What made you start it?

We had spent a ton of time with an NBA basketball blog and had also really started to become a student of the “make money” and marketing niches in blogging.  Our NBA blog started to take off through a ton of hard work and research, and then we realized there was nothing out there to help sports blogs reach their potential.  We sort of pioneered this “marketing/make money with your sports blog” idea and so far it has really been fun.

What is your background?

My background is really as a techy with a huge heart and passion for sports.  I recently ran a pretty successful NBA blog which gave me the motivation and knowledge to power the Sports Dollar.

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

I wouldn’t say that it is completely for fun because we’d love to make a full time living out of this, but right now we are having a blast.  Trying out new things and growing our readership has really become exciting.  The goal in the long run is to definitely make this our full time job.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map? (if you bring in more the 5,000 uniques a month)

We almost hit 20,000 uniques last month which was a pretty major deal.  We had a few solid linkbait pieces if you could call them that, that seemed to really grab peoples attention and give us a ton of solid links that in turn worked into some pretty significat traffic.  I would say a tipping point would be the day we heard some pretty nice comments from Busted Coverage and also started noticing comments from some of the other top notch blogs like Hugging Harold Reynolds.

What type of blogging software do you use?

Oh boy…Blogger.  But it looks sexy enough now doesn’t it?

What ad network(s) do you use?

We initially used way too many.  Right now it is down to Adify through Yardbarker, Performancing Ads, and Commission Junction.  The nice thing is that over the last 2 months, we’ve really started to hit some solid private ad deals so we’ve been able to run away from all the scary ad networks out there.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

We’re getting pretty close to the $1000 per month mark.  Hopefully soon!

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

A brand spanking new customized WordPress theme.  It’s time to move on from Blogger, but I don’t want to use some generic theme that 13,000 other blogs are also using.

What are some of your favorite blogs?

Cuzoogle, NE Patriots Draft, Busted Coverage, My Sports Rumors, Empty the Bench are the blogs I read almost daily.

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

Sports blogging in general is looking really big.  Blog World Expo, which is one of the biggest blogging conferences in the world, finally launched some sports blogging sessions at this year’s event.  That is major and I hope that next year they’ll continue and we can promote the heck out of it to get some major sports bloggers there!