I’m from Chicago and love the Bulls, and I love writing, so it made all the sense in the world. Later, I joined another website that also covered the Bulls, but that’s not really important right now.

Here’s the thing about writing on the Internet: Anyone can do it. Seriously. In fact, I’m guessing most of you have at some point.

Here’s how I was — for lack of a better word — “hired” by the first website. I knew the guy who ran it because we followed each other on Twitter and had engaged in more than a few basketball conversations. So I asked him if I could join his site and he said yes. A few days later we made it official and that was that.

Seriously, that’s all that happened.

So when I say I am a semi-professional blogger, it’s really not all that impressive. Anyway, back to my original point about the last month or so being entertaining.

About a month ago, the National Basketball Association, or NBA, season was winding down and we bloggers — that just sounds sad, my apologies — were gearing up for the offseason and the various shenanigans that accompany it.

Then I broke my wrist.

See, as a writer, wrists are very important things. Especially when it’s your right wrist and you happen to be right-handed. Naturally, this put my writing career on hold.

So I’ve spent the last month observing the NBA without being able to comment on it much. And that’s where the entertainment comes in.

As a basketball blogger, you’re dependent on actual journalists to give you information. While most sites possess the capability to get their writers media credentials for games, they either don’t bother or don’t have the resources to get their writers day-to-day inside access. That’s where Twitter comes in.

You can all knock Twitter if you want, but it’s a blogger’s single most important tool.

Without Twitter, breaking news can come from any number of sources and we would all have to manually check each of them. We are certainly capable of doing that, but Twitter is so much more convenient.

That’s not really the point. The point is that watching news break on Twitter and then the NBA community lose their collective minds over it is highly entertaining — especially when it basically happens every day for a month.

OK, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’m going to change direction a bit.

I touched on this earlier, but I want to explain briefly how one would go about finding success as a blogger, whether you want to blog about the NBA or flower arrangements or anything else.

Well before my own blogging career ever got started, a well-known basketball blogger was asked about what an aspiring writer should do to get noticed.

His response was very simple: In order to write on the Internet, one must first do a lot of writing on the Internet. That might seem circular, but it’s not. Basically, if you have something you’re interested in writing about, start your own blog and start writing about it.

WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and multiple other websites all offer free spaces for you to start publishing your work. Getting your work out there is the first and most important step.

The next step is to keep writing. Write nearly every day, even if you don’t really feel like it.

The more quality content you produce, the more likely it is that something will get noticed. From there, the rest is up to you.

I would also say networking is an excellent idea. In my opinion, Twitter is excellent for this purpose because you can find people who want to talk about pretty much anything you may be interested in. Find those people, make connections, and from there things will become much easier.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go ice my wrist now.

Ow.

Caleb Nordgren is a guest columnist at The State News and a journalism junior. Reach him at nordgren@msu.edu.