The World of Bacon Sports. Our Mission, Progress, and Ken Griffey Jr Jr

Today is a slow sports day so I’d like to tell you a bit more about what’s going on with Bacon Sports and how we got to where we are today. We want to be a site and company that you feel a part of, from our content and jerseys that we post to the growth of our traffic and the sweet events we put on. Thanks to all of you who have supported the site since it started. We really appreciate it so much.

Sit back, grab a red Gatorade or a Soda Shaq and get ready to hear about how we are building the awesomest sports media company ever.

What is the mission of Bacon Sports?

Our mission is to help people achieve their dreams through a love of sports.

It has always been my dream to work in sports. As many of you know the opportunities to work in sports are few and far between and since most of us aren’t 6’7″ and can dunk the NBA isn’t an option. Seeing as how you only live once I decided that there’s no way I’m going through life without giving it a shot. The best way for me to get the job that I’ve always dreamed of is to create it myself. And if I can create a company where everyone who works there is also living their dream, well, then that’s not working. That’s living (Red from Shawshank Redemption told me something along those lines).

The story behind the name Bacon Sports:

Original name: KenGriffeyJrJr.com.

That’s right. Bacon Sports wasn’t our first choice. I had just gotten back from 3 days at Lollapalooza back in August of 2011 and there was a band there called Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr. For whatever reason I found the second Jr to be pretty hilarious. My favorite baseball player who was never on a team that I rooted for was Ken Griffey Jr. Dude was awesome, just look at his Upper Deck rookie card (which I still have never owned and am not happy about it). What better way to start a sports site than to call it Ken Griffey Jr Jr? Domain purchased.

Zoom forward to the site design and our boy Adam Kipple over at Three Ring Focus (who is part of the crew that runs People of Walmart) says that he just isn’t sure if everyone will get and remember KenGriffeyJrJr.com. If we weren’t married to the name what about some others, like BaconSports.com? BOOM! There it is. Two of the greatest things in life combined into one.

Are you a website or a company?

Both. We run BaconSports.com, we are starting to sell our own custom apparel, and we are putting on events. Events like the Bacon, Sports & Beer Celebration.

We currently have a staff of 6 part time interns and 15 freelance writers (spread all over the country). Bacon Sports wouldn’t be where it is at now without the time and effort of all of those people so I thank them.

There is only one full time person doing this. I quit my job selling online advertising (which I had done for the last 8 years) and went all in on October of 2012.

What is this Bacon, Sports & Beer Celebration that we are throwing? 

Only the awesomest and most delicious event to ever hit Chicago. You can check it out at BaconSportsBeer.com or on this post we did. The Celebration will be one of the biggest ways for us to be able to get revenue in the door so that we can help take the company to the next level.

What’s our office look like?

This.

We work out of an incubator (which is a fancy way of saying “business personal trainer”) in River North (Chicago) called Venture Shot. We pay money to get office space (which is shared) and some mentorship to help us turn this into something special.

In order to make this feel more real and get the Bacon Sports culture started I put up some old school posters. Bobby Bo (who is a reminder of the days when the Buccos were good and actually were above .500), Junior Griffey, two MJ’s (for obvious reasons), one not of THE Dream Team (as in the Olympics) but instead of someone’s Dream Team (you know “If I could create a team of NBA players with whoever I want on it”). You can’t see but there’s also a Cecil Fielder poster on the left. I’m a sports junkie that loves sports nostalgia and what better way to decorate the office then by dropping it old school.

At the end of last week I brought in a TV and hooked up an Apple TV so that we can stream WatchESPN all day. You know, so we can absorb sports information and stuff. You don’t drop Tree Rollins, Eric Bieniemy, and Scott Bentley references without always watching sports (#randomathlete for all you Twitter followers out there).

What’s the site traffic at:

In June we had our best month of traffic ever as we reached 25,404 page views and 12,993 uniques. Well sort of best ever. We’ve had some stuff picked up a few times by CNNSI’s Hot Clicks (who I’d highly recommend you check out, you can get a lot of sports goodness there) and that’s sent droves of traffic to the site very quickly but over a short time span (like 30,000 page views in 24 hours).

I don’t really count those instances in our traffic numbers. Bacon Sports is only going to be as good as we are consistent. You deserve great quality content all the time. We can’t always expect to get huge referrals like that.

There are a few things that really separate Bacon Sports from the other sports sites out there. First and foremost, we come up with unique sports comedy content and don’t repost what other sites publish and link back to them like so many other sports blogs do. I’m totally cool with the sites that do that (they probably have a lot more traffic than we do). It makes my life as a sports fan much easier when I only have to go to one destination to see the best of the Web in sports. However, that’s a very crowded landscape and it’s not very original if you are further down the food chain and not actually creating the content yourself. You deserve better than seeing content that you can find on dozens of other sites.

With that same theme, you’ll notice that we don’t have a lot of scantily clad hot chick pictures on the site. Chicks = page views. We aren’t stupid, we know that. Another thing that a lot of sports sites do is have a Chick of the Day (or something) where it’s some smokeshow prancing around in a bikini. We aren’t going to deliver better hot chick/bikini pictures then you find on The Chive or some other sites so we’ll leave that to them. Like I just mentioned, we like to be unique and original and there’s nothing special about doing what everyone else is doing.

Parting Shots 

This is just the beginning of what is going to be the most amazing journey ever. We are glad to have you all along for the ride. We are going to start ramping up our original video content so don’t forget to Subscribe to our Youtube page. We also just launched our first podcast so give that a listen (it’ll be the first of many). From time to time I’ll try and give you updates as to the progress of the site/company. As I said, we want you to feel like you are a part of this too. If you ever have any questions, ideas, or just want to talk shop holla at me at rob@baconsports.com.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to go bid on a Fred Hoiberg Pacers jersey on eBay.