The Nats Blog was the vessel that helped me break into the sports + tech industry. I get asked often about how I turned a baseball blog into a career...and I usually just give the simple answer:

"I worked really really hard"

But there's actually a lot more to the story...

I started on Blogger in 08. At the time this was the biggest mainstream way to start a blog and pretty much it allowed you to build something with next to no commitment. It was totally free, you needed no design skills, all you needed was words.

I set up http://Natspark.blogspot.com 

You can read my very first post here: http://natspark.blogspot.com/2008/04/nationals-lose-9th-straight-fall-to.html

I acquired http://TheNatsBlog.com  a few weeks in and stayed on the Blogger for about a year. I stretched the design as far as I could with my technical abilities. I learned a lot, but mostly I learned my limitations

I experimented with all sorts of multi-media options for new forms of storytelling. Video embeds, photo layouts, all things that sound silly now but were rather innovative then.

I also tried to spruce up my site with things like Widgets (all the rage), three columns, and more.

One thing that was essential in those early blog days was your link list. This was mostly a status symbol. Who could you get to link to YOUR site? It was a big deal. I remember it took years for me to get The Washington Post to add The Nats Blog on its link list.

This was also huge for traffic. In those days, believe it or not, people would go to a popular blog to find links to less popular blogs because social hadn't matured into a content discovery mechanism. Also, being linked by a high ranking page did wonders for your SEO.

About one year in I decided I want to get serious. At that time your best bet to up your level as a blogger was to be accepted into a sports blog network. There were many at that time:

SBNation
Bloguin
MVN
YardBarker
Big Lead
FSV
Bleacher Report
And eventually even ESPN.

I went with @Bloguin, at that time led by @bkoo. Bloguin differentiated themselves in three brilliant ways:

1. They let you keep your blog.
2. They provided design resources to revamp your blog and your branding.
3. It felt like a collective of upstart bloggers working together

To me #1 was a must but #2 was the most attractive. SB Nation gave you the biggest traffic boost but they owned the blogs (+there was already a Nats blog). Others had cookie cutter design templates...but Bloguin was positioned to super charge your site to the next level, I was in

Within weeks I had a new design, logo, and team powering me to take on the baseball blogosphere (yes that was a term). The operation finally felt legitimate...but I had a new problem I needed to address. I needed people to actually see this thing, and to actually read my words.

At that point I was getting some organic reach but a lot of it was from friends or a few loyalists I picked up along the way...but at 20 years old I hadn't really figured out what a content growth strategy looked like...Fortunately, very few other bloggers had either.

The first thing I did was "hit the streets" to build relationships. I reached out to every baseball blog and general sports blog I could to introduce myself and offer myself up for collaboration. I didn't just go after the big sites and ask for links...I looked for value.

One crazy example? I pulled together blogs from the WORST franchises in sports (which the Nats were at the time). And we did a series together where we took turns arguing why our franchise was or was not the worst. We had the Clippers, TWolves, and many more. And it drove traffic

When I reached out to the big guns (Yahoo Sports, MLBTR, MetsBlog) I did so with this basic script:

1. I admire what you've accomplished and want to follow in your footsteps.

2. What do you NOT have coverage on where I could help plug in?

Where I wanted to be a lot of these sites...a lot of these sites wanted to be ESPN. That meant full coverage...but they didn't have a series of writers. So if there was any sort of Nats slant I could put on something that helped them, I would write it, and they would link it.

This link hunting was an adrenaline rush. When you hit big you would often get thousands, but sometimes hundreds of thousands of visitors in a single day. This was a huge rush when you were covering a last place franchise with no built in fan base yet.

Of course, pulling in Nats fans was more important than general fans. So I needed a strategy here too.

This is where I learned about SEO. I found Google News optimized for speed and relevance scores. This was premier real estate at the top of search results, and TNB was there.

I knew that with my domain name and strong rank for words like Nats and Nationals, and the fact that none of my work needed to go through an editor...I had a competitive advantage even against The Washington Post. I pre-wrote stories. As soon as a game ended, I had one published.

This meant that if anyone searched something like "Nats Score" or "Nats game" to see the final result, my game summary came up first. And because it was up there first, people clicked on it...and so when WaPo finally got their recap up...mine still ranked as more authoritative!

The reason this all worked is because social media hadn't truly evolved yet. Or at least no one had figured it out. Bloggers and publishers viewed social as a fishing pond. Throw out some bait...hope for bites...pull them in for traffic.

I was one of these misguided bloggers.

I actually (ironically) disregarded social as a growth tool for TNB because I just didn't get it. I didn't see the future where people would be consuming content on networks, not using them as a way to find websites. There's a reason they called Twitter "microblogging" at first.

By 2010 I was really cooking with gas. A small project thought up in my dorm room was no attaining mainstream relevance. I was literally in awe of the fact that I was getting linked by Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Fox Sports. I had been invited to be credentialed by the Nats.

I really felt I had the chance to be the next @matthewcerrone to have my blog acquired. Or that this would ultimately be a tool to make me the next regional sports network.

Of course, Blogging's day was coming to a quick close. I can't say I saw it, but I parlayed it into a job

Before I knew it was I putting my entrepreneurial and scrappy tech + sports skills to work at Octagon. And eventually my time on the blog faded away...but the lessons I learned while building it have powered my career to this day.

Here are just a few:

1. No one actually knows what the market will do or what influence tech will have. Get your hands dirty, figure it out, and there's a good chance if you are smart and an independent thinker you'll get out ahead of the pack. I still try to do that today even at Instagram.

2. Small hacks can scale on big stages. The SEO tricks I utilized to build The Nats Blog was the blue print for Twackle Now...a program we built at Octagon which powered Sports Illustrated's breaking news function for a short time. It worked for TNB, Twackle, and SI

3. Networking the right way works no matter who you represent or what you are trying to do. Provide value to THE OTHER PERSON first, and find a way to map it back to your own mission. The stuff I did to collaborate with other blogs was nuts, but it worked.

4. If you want to build something you just need to be obsessed with it. I am not naive to think that I could have done all that if I was married with kids. I also know I got lucky that I was competing in a blue ocean market and the Nats had drafted Harper and Strasburg.

Anyways...this was the never asked for...way too long oral history of how I turned The Nats Blog into a career. It is one of the things I am most proud of and something that I will look back fondly on for the rest of my life.