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April 14th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Back in 2003, when blogs were just catching on with the mainstream, college student Matthew Cerrone started a GeoCities site called MetsBlog.com to track his favorite baseball team. Fast-forward nine years and he’s turned the hobby into a full-time job.
Cerrone‘s story offers a window into how sports fans today — with smarts, hard work and a little luck — are able to turn fandom in to a fulltime career.
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So how did he do it?
After college, Cerrone worked part-time for a media relations company on the East Coast, but struggled to divert energy and attention from his Mets site.
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“I was probably spending a little too much time writing MetsBlog and not enough on my actual job, such as is the case with most bloggers,” he says.
He was gaining traction though. When Cerrone was offered an opportunity to do public relations work for a gubernatorial campaign — which would have meant a hiatus from his hobby that had grown into a passion — friends and family encouraged him to stick with MetsBlog instead.
By 2006, MetsBlog was attracting about a million readers per month. Cerrone approached SportsNet New York, a regional cable network that had more recently launched a content site, with a pitch: Despite his success with readers, he was having trouble gaining access with the team. Meanwhile, despite SportsNet’s mainstream media bonafides, it was having trouble pulling in readers.
A partnership was formed. His part-time work was left behind, and today Cerrone oversees SportsNet New York’s digital media for several other local team blogs, while still focusing on MetsBlog. Today, he says, MetsBlogs has nearly 3 million monthly readers.
Cerrone points to a number of keys to his own success, which can be applied by others seeking a similar path. First, he says, picking the right domain name is huge. Knowing how to promote work for larger audiences and form relationships with other media players is also useful.
But possibly the biggest thing, he says, is being able to constantly adjust in tools and strategy. Switching from pretending to be a mainstream news source to taking a more authentic, fandom-based approach was a critical move for MetBlog.
“Those things all combined around 2006 and 2007 to help it catch fire,” Cerrone says.
Now that he’s reached a level of stability, Cerrone’s next plans are to revamp his personal website, launch a series of sports and social media-focused podcasts and begin writing advice for how others can replicate his blogging success. But no matter how much of an “expert” he becomes, Cerrone knows blogging will always come with a certain reputation.
“There’s still that blogger skepticism that will be with us forever, and that’s a good thing,” he says. “As long as there’s that skepticism, I’m probably doing things right.”
Check out the video below to see what a day in the life of MetsBlog is like for Matthew Cerrone.
Do you think it’s still possible to start a sports blog from scratch and make it a career? Let us know in the comments.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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