What Most Don't Understand About Being a Blogger

In my capacity as MLB Director of Development for the Fansided Network, I deal with writers in all fashions. I'm basically in charge of scouting and recruiting new staff and I also have final say over which writers are hired and which ones are not. My "job" requires me to read writing samples to determine who makes the grade.

Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in all things writing or all things baseball, but I do feel that with my background being what it is, I have a good handle on what to look for in a successful blogger. You have no idea how many applicants get rejected out-of-hand simply because they didn't take the time to spell check their initial email to us. One thing you cannot do as a blogger is have silly, avoidable, errors. The way I see it, there are a handful of "deadly sins" of blogging and things like mis-using certain words (sit/set, they're/their/there, too/to) are a quick way to wind up writing at Bleacher Report.

More than that though, what bothers me is the "writers" who assume because they know about their favorite team, properly using the English language shouldn't matter. People, they are called "sportsWRITERS" and as such, you should expect that one of the two requirements will be writing clearly and effectively. I even had one guy plagiarize his writing sample that he sent me. I only caught it because I had happened to read the article he ripped off about three hours earlier on MLB.com. Needless to say he didn't get the job.

But you know what my biggest pet peeve is with many writers? It's the unreasonable expectations they have that their work not only deserves monetary compensation, but that the money should be good enough that they can live off of it. Seriously.

I work for one of the most aggressive sports networks in the world in terms of how we compensate our staff. Instead of a flat rate, our lead staff earn a split (50/50) of all the advertising revenue from their site. I can tell you with certainty that my haul each month is on par or better than what the guys at SBNation are making each month, and their traffic is something like 10 times what mine is. But SBNation pays a flat rate and Fansided doesn't. The result is that I make more money per visitor. That said, the money I make is usually enough to take my family out to dinner once or twice a month. No one is getting rich here.

There are literally millions of blogs in the world but only a small handful of the people who write them earn any money at all for doing so. Now, you can look at it like the Network is getting rich by using someone else's work, but you have to remember what the Network is providing to its staff. Web hosting, domain fees, site design, graphic design, technical support, not to mention accounting and legal fees associated with running the business; all of this is provided at no charge to our staff and all of it is paid for via the network's share on the revenue. Sure, you can go start a free blog on Blogger or Wordpress, but you don't get access to the resources of the Fansided (or SBN or whatever) network that can and do bring visitors to your door. You go try to get your .blogspot site accepted to Google News. Good luck with that one. But with a network, you get free exposure that sometimes can lead to bigger opportunities down the road. Though Fansided has been around for only about four years now, we have had more than a couple of our writers be offered full-time, paid, writing jobs. I just don't see many guys getting that call without being exposed to hundreds of thousands of readers.

The hard facts of blogging are this: it's more work than you think it is, it's done for little to no money at all, and it probably will never lead you anywhere in terms of a career. What I have found is that so long as you are doing it for the right reasons, blogging can be very rewarding.

When I took the gig at MCB, I had been with another network and I had been an independent blogger. I was writing for free, but I was writing because I had something to say. When Fansided approached me, they mentioned their revenue sharing deal and we discussed the rather small amount of money I could expect to make (my first revenue sharing payment covered three months and totaled $27). But I knew that the network afforded me things in terms of the back-end stuff that I was having trouble handling on my own (and I had been paying for), and that ultimately, I could reach a much larger audience with them than I ever could without.

As I told my wife at the time, "I was writing for free anyway, if this deal buys me a pizza every now and then, that's a bonus." That's an attitude I have tried to maintain throughout my tenure with Fansided.

Being a writer is not unlike being a musician or an artist. The likelihood that you'll ever earn a living with any of them is very small, but it's done because there is a draw to the creative outlet the mind needs. The written word is still a powerful thing and one that must be handled with responsibility and respect. Being a baseball writer is about more than baseball. It isn't about knowing what the infield fly rule is or about being able to decipher when exactly a player will achieve Super-Two status. Sure, those things help, but what really matters is being able to express your original thoughts in an original way and engaging the reader. If you can master that, the writing becomes it's own reward.