Tag Archive | Sports Illustrated

Learning How To Build A Business Blog From The Houston Astros

By Cheval John

November 3rd, 2017

On a normal day, going to downtown houston from the northline train station would be a breeze.

Today was not one of those days because the city of houston hosted a parade for their hometown team, Astros, who won their first World Series (WS) championship on Wednesday night.

The people of houston were very excited to celebrate with their team.

By all accounts, an estimated one million people lined up along the parade route leading to city hall.

Half of those traveled by train into downtown to be a part of history.

The Astros brought hope to those who were still recovering from hurricane harvey.

The road to victory began in 2011 when Jim Crane bought the team from Drayton McClane.

The condition to get the sale approved by Major League Baseball (MLB) was moving the team to the American League from the National League the following year.

At the time of the sale, the Astros were on the decline after their previous appearance in the 2005 World Series.

Crane knew they had to rebuild the team from scratch.

The first step in the master plan was hiring Jeff Luhnow, who was the architect behind the St.Louis Cardinals 2006 and 2011 championship teams, as the Astros general manager.

Luhnow used sports analytics to figure out who would be the right fit for the Astros.

In the early stages of the rebuild, the Astros lost 100 games in three straight seasons.

Fans were wondering what was going on with the team.

Many sports pundits thought the whole system of analytics were a joke because they believed Luhnow did not play the sport of baseball.

The criticism intensified in 2014 when Sports Illustrated (SI) declared on their cover the Astros as the 2017 World Series Champions.

Many thought it was a marketing ploy to get more readers.

The folks from S.I. knew they were heading in the right direction.

Signs of the rebuild began to show when they made the 2015 playoffs, where they lost to the eventual World Series champion, Kansas City Royals in the American League Divisional Round.

Though the 2016 season was a failure, the Astros fans were very optimistic for 2017.

The team did not disappoint as they clinched their very first regular season championship in the American League West, went through the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees to win the American League pennant.

Then they went on to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in seven games to complete their dream season.

You might be wondering how the Astros winning the World Series got to do with growing your business or personal blog?

Glad you ask.

Growing a blog takes a whole lot of time and patience.

In the same manner of how the Astros’ general manager had a long term goal to make the team a success, you must look at the long game in building a tribe for your blog and not go after the home run.

No one can build a blog to 500,000 views in six months unless they had learned lessons from their first blog or if they are a celebrity.

You also must stay the course and ignore the outside noise from those who might be telling you to give up.

If you think you do not have the time to put together the words from scratch, here are some business blogs who uses twitter chats to put together weekly posts.

Note: This is not a quick fix at all because it takes a lot of work to host a twitter chat and even more work to put together the recap for the blog.

#ContentWritingChat, hosted by Express Writers

#TwitterSmarter, hosted by Madalyn Sklar

#SproutChat, hosted by Sprout Social

#VCBuzz, hosted by Viral Content Bee

#ContentChat, hosted by Erika Heald

What are more ways you can build your blog from scratch?