One hundred unique visitors in one day!

OK, when you say it like that, it doesn't seem like a lot - but I've been writing my ass off for the last three weeks, trying to get some good content in front of soccer readers in the States.

Some things have worked, and some haven't. But yesterday I finally topped 100 unique visitors in a single day - that's not page views, but unique IP's according to my google analytics report.

I'm a bit worried that I won't be able to keep up this pace of writing however, so I've asked a couple of guys whose style I like to contribute when they get a chance. Between the four of us, I'm hoping that we'll still produce content that's timely and interesting to our readers.

Well fellow bloggers - Gruffgoat's Football Blog seems to be leveling out with steady readers at about 50 per day based on my content alone. I think this is respectable considering it's so new but I'm also impatient!

I've asked a couple of fellow bloggers that I like to link back to me and my soccerlinks ranking has increased from over 200 to 151 - which is pretty cool.

I'm also going to try my hand as a guest blogger on yankssoccer.com to see how that works out.

Lastly, I submitted a couple of my more cogent posts to EzineArticles.com - one got approved but I realized that I submitted under the "football" category which meant it was next to a bunch of NFL drills and such - so I found the "soccer" category and had to resubmit. I'll let you know when those articles get published.

Well folks, the op-ed piece I wrote about the MLS potentially coming to Atlanta seemed to resonate and I hope to have picked up a few loyal readers. But that piece reminded me of Step 1! In the growing universe of soccer blogs out there, content is indeed king. But what is content?

I'm trying to figure that out myself. The way I see it, much like a newspaper, there are a couple of different types of content.

1. News (recounting events that have happened either to you or someone else)
2. Opinion (picking a subject and talking about it)

In order to gain readers, you have to add value to either of those categories. How? In writing, there are only a couple of ways to add value to the reader: Unique subject matter or good writing style. That's really it.

Gruffgoat's Football Blog is a sports blog, focusing on one sport. Sure there are nuances in that the sport is soccer and there is always drama when you talk about soccer in America, but are people in London tuning in to my blog to re-read the same news they can read from the BBC or Guardian? I doubt it. So how does one differentiate the news to make it more valuable or interesting? First, let's look at the types of news:

News on Me! - probably the most common blog type is the news update on...you. This is the personal journal blog. For the first time in history, this medium call the "blog" has opened News on Me up to the entire world. What you're reading now has an element of that.

News on Niche Stuff - unreported on mainstream news channels (i.e., US Open Cup news, a lot of the Atlanta area soccer news, etc.)

The rest of the News - reported on mainstream news channels, but I try to add some editorial content that adds to the reading experience

As far as news reporting goes, I don't have the resources to travel the world and provide proper journalistic first hand updates, so I pull selective stories from sources and retell them in my own words.

The other type of writing is the Opinion stuff. For Gruffgoat's Football Blog, this is an important area of writing. Floating opinions on subjects as wide ranging as the Offside rule, MLS expansion, or the Future of Spectator Soccer in America, is one of my whole purposes for starting the blog.

Who knows who is reading this material. But, if Don Garber gets word that there are people in Atlanta who think the only way Atlanta sports fans will get on board with MLS is if there are two teams, then he may just dismiss that as poppycock, or he may, somewhere in the back of his mind, start thinking about the challenges of geographic dispersion on a sport that requires roots in fan intimacy, and consider what it means to have a cross town rivalry.

At any rate, until I can bring a cadre of crack reporters on board, the near term future of Gruffgoat's Football Blog is less focus on mainstream news, and more and more focus on the unique news stuff and the opinion stuff. Happy Reading!

I started to get antsy about the title of my post and changed it from the somewhat generic "Can Atlanta Support an MLS Franchise" to "MLS in Atlanta? Why Not Make it a Double?"

We'll see if that resonates better.

I just published a piece on the potential expansion of the MLS in to the Atlanta market called, "Can Atlanta Support an MLS Franchise?" which I think is both topical and interesting and could drive some traffic to Gruffgoat's Football Blog.

For these first fourteen days, I've been submitting my own pieces to digg and other social networking sites, but I want to let this one sit on my site for a day or two to see if anyone thinks it "diggworthy".

Also, views seem to be pretty steady at around 35 per day; which is still quite low, but I'm ok with that for now. I've had a total of 329 unique visitors so far with 1,340 pageviews.

Interestingly enough, my most popular article so far has been about the collision between Turkey's Ayhan Akman and Germany's Simon Rolfes. Both players needed medical treatment on the sideline - Akman actually got his head stapled shut before returning to the pitch - I guess that kind of grit and determination has broad appeal!

I'm going to keep Gruffgoat's Football Blog as a blend of news interest stories, local Atlanta interest stories, and commentary...with that backdrop, I have 63 posts and counting - I'm thinking about enlisting some help; particularly for the local Atlanta interest stories...I just don't have the arms and legs to do all of it, but still want Gruffgoat's Football Blog to be a key soccer resource with broad reach.

Folks, this is how Gruffgoat's Football Blog looks today, 5 July, 2008:



My template originally looked very much like this one:



I've circled in red the Ads I removed from Gruffgoat's Football Blog. The Ad Bar on the top right header, the Adsense bar above the first post, and the 2x3 line of 125x125 ads on the right quadrant.

Why? After looking at my soccer site and looking at some of the highest rated by links and readership, I was thinking my site looked very busy. It looked like it was more about advertising and less about content. So about ten days in, I moved almost all of my ads to a single "Sponsors Page" that looks like this:



I'm going to track hits to this page through Google Analytics and report on how well this is working.

Cheers.