Category Archives: Card Blogging

Starting a Card Blog

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Tonight I thought I would try to catch up on my card feeds. Lots of good content. Still got a lot to go through but I wanted to comment on a post that stuck out.

Sports Cards Uncensored is a great card blog. After nearly scoring 100,000 hits (congratulations), he decided to write about getting into card blogging. What a great idea for a post!

I would like to comment on a few things he mentioned:

  • Next, you may want to buy a .com, because its that much easier to remember than XXXX.blogspot.com. Every card blogger should buy their own domain name. Not only does it make it easier to establish your own personal brand, but you can also switch to whatever platform or blogging software without changing the domain name. It is never too late to do this. Sooner the better.
  • Blogger and WordPress are probably the two most popular blogging engines out there. From my experience, Blogger is much easier to use, but has a ton less features than WordPress. If you have never run a site before, you may want to go with Blogger, because even I chose wordpress at one point, and all it did was confuse me. There are lots of different types of blogging software. The most popular by far is Blogger by Google. But I recommend WordPress. It is great software. The possibilities are endless to what you can do. This site is built on WordPress. Remember, you can get a free hosted account at wordpress.com and when you grow out of that, you can use the open source version. I will be talking a bit more about this at a later date.
  • Another important thing you have to remember, is that design of your blog makes a huge difference. If the layout is too complicated or too weird, people wont come back once they visit, and wont stay long when they come. This is a big deal. Card blogs are lacking in this department.

Those are the main things that stuck out. He obviously know how to write and promote a blog. I wanted to point out the technology side of things.

I’m pretty impressed with the card blogs out there. Keep up the good work!

Beckett and Their Blog

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beckett_logoI subscribe to a lot of blog feeds. I have recently been adding lots of feeds for card blogs. I love reading card blogs.

Since I subscribe to so many blog feeds, I find it very annoying when publishers to not publish entire posts within their feed. Most of the time, I unsubscribe from the blog. My thinking is that the publisher does not care about my time or what I really want, why should I spend my time and give them my attention?

So it is with the Beckett Blog. I don’t subscribe to it because they don’t publish the entire post. Instead they post only a snippet. Annoying. I’m sure they publish good content. But don’t ask me if they do.

Publishers, especially those blogging about cards, need all of the exposure they can get, even Beckett. If somebody writes intriguing content, readers will still make it over to the blog to comment and read others’ comments. This doesn’t happen with partial feeds.

I did a search to find the Beckett Blog and quickly found it. But first I typed in blog.beckett.com and got redirected to http://beckettdotcom.blogspot.com/. Not their blog but I was confused. Or perhaps it is an old blog started by Beckett.

First of all, Beckett should be hosting their own blog. Or at least have their WordPress hosted blog go to it’s own address. It’s very inexpensive and totally worth it. By the way, good choice of using WordPress.com.

Going to the Beckett site I could find no link to their blog. Again, I know they have a blog. Make it a big deal and give your reader the opportunity to consume the content how they please.

Card Blogging

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I have been subscribing to lots of card blogs lately. I have to say for the most part they are entertaining.

Over the next little while, I am going to be linking to every few days, depending on how busy I get. I’ll also give a small review of the blog with a minor twist. I am not going to critique the content. All card blogs are valuable to the community. My review will consist of my thoughts on the technology side of their blog.

What does that mean? I am interested in the design of the blog. Does the blog have any cool features? What platform are they running on? I’ll think of other things that I think are relevant. And I can add and change any points of emphasis whenever I want, since it is my review.

Most people will not care to read my review. I’m guessing card bloggers for the most part do not care about the technology side of blogging. But I’ll tell you why I think this type of review is important.

  1. I’m guessing you want many people, mainly others within the industry and hobby, to read your blog.
  2. You want to be found by search engines.
  3. You want to network with other collectors.
  4. You may want to monetize your content.
  5. You have something to share with the world.

Keep in mind that I am doing this for fun. I want all card blogs to be successful.

Please let me know if you have a blog you would like me to look at. Or if you don’t want me to look at yours. Otherwise, I’ll use the Sports Card Blog Directory, google, or just get links from other sites.

I will also be reviewing web apps and other web sites. I’ll create a page on this site where everybody will be able to find links.

This should be fun.

Sports Card Blog Directory

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For a while now, I’ve been keeping an eye on the Sports Card Blog Directory. Over the weekend, I emailed Mario from Wax Heaven to have him add this blog to the directory. He promptly added the link. Thanks Mario! He does a great job on his blog and shows a lot of passion for the hobby.

On a side not, I was thinking that it would be nice to allow collectors to automatically submit a site to a blogging directory. After approval, the blog would show on the list. Of course, for them to continue to be shown on the list, they would have to post every so often. I would be happy to put something together if you all think it would benefit us all. I know Mario has been trying to get rid of the responsibility to maintain the list.

What do you all think? What would somebody have to do to keep their blog on the list? Are there other card blogging directories?