I know as part of the Sportingo network we shouldn’t expect much from Caught Offside but making paedophile jokes as part of their headlines really is too much.
I’ve now deleted the link from this site to Caught Offside.
Fucking pathetic, guys. Really, truly pathetic.
Related: How to write like Sportingo.
Received to my email just moments ago:
Hello,
I am representing the Football blog - COS - http://www.caughtoffside.com.
COS is a well established blog that receives 300,000 entries a month.We visited your site and found it very interesting and professional.
We would like to propose a link exchange between our sites for SEO purposes.
If you are interesting, we would be happy to hear from you.
Best regards,
Xxxxxxx, project manager
How would I be able to prove that I’m interesting to take up such a splendid offer? And apparently they receive 300,000 entries per month. That’s a lot of entries, I guess that’s somewhere in the region of 10,000 posts per day.
Oh, they mean visitors do they? Or hits? Or page views? Who can tell?
Message to Caught Offside, if you’re going to pay people to try and rig search engines for you, try and ensure they’re not cretins.
There’s an article on Whoateallthepies that I want to comment on but I do not want to have to go through the rigmarole of registering with the ‘Pies community’.
I’ve checked all the posts for the last few days and out of all that content that the guys are working so hard to produce (the 20 teenagers post in particular is really good) the most comments any entry has is 5. I suspect Pies has a much bigger readership than Left Back yet we got 23 comments on a post yesterday. It must be disheartening to write so much and get so little feedback.
Part of blogging is about interacting with your readers, not making it difficult for them to leave comments on your articles. I assume this is a Shiny Media edict to get people to sign up and become valuable registered members but the lads writing the blog deserve better than that. Great things can come out of comments, funny stuff, interesting debates and arguments and communities can grow, but Pies is missing all that because of the comments policy.
So, Shiny Media, can we have open comments on Whoateallthepies?
Most of us here on Left Back are mere amateur bloggers.
We write because we enjoy writing about football. We write because we want to get things off our chest. We write because we live in the vain hope that somebody out there might find it mildly entertaining.
We’re under no illusions about our place in the grand scheme of things. Yet some days we look wistfully at those whose skills are far beyond anything we could ever hope to achieve. Such keyboard panache coupled with the on-the-money opinions and just the right amount of credibility is not something everybody can pull off.
Oh, sure. We can try but what would be the point? It would be like us setting up a stall selling our pitiful sketches when next door is Picasso selling his genuine paintings for a fiver a time.
It would be akin to us trying to flog our home made rap album while 50 cent and Jay Z and Run DMC gave away their masterpieces for free. Truly we would be pissing in the wind.
But I know there are some of you out there with ambitions loftier than our own. Perhaps you just need that extra bit of impetus or advice to get you going. So, in the spirit of blogtasticness here is our guide to help you write like Sportingo. It looks like it’s a fairly easy recipe but then unicycling while juggling basketballs looks simple when you see an expert doing it. Once you get up and running and get a few months practice under your belt you should be fine but it’s getting started that’s the difficult bit.
Here’s what you need:
One player name
One, or two, club names
One large amount of money
The word ‘in’
Sounds easy so far, I know, but it’s trying to combine them that can be difficult.
The first way is to take one of each ingredient and combine them at random, so you might get something like:
In Lampard Barcelona £50m
That obviously doesn’t make much sense so you need to flesh it out a bit and jiggle things around. With a little practice you’ll come up with something like:
Lampard in £50m Barcelona move
To add a bit of spice you can throw in words like ’shock’ or ‘mega deal’. So now it becomes:
Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move
Where it gets complicated is when you add the other team name in.
Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move Chelsea - doesn’t work, does it? But think. How can we do this. Yes, that’s right.
Chelsea’s Lampard in shock £50m Barcelona move.
That way you get maximum exposure on all the football newsfeeds and your story gets lots of hits from suckers who think there might the slightest shred of evidence to support it.
Try a couple yourself. Here are your ingredients: Ronaldo - Real Madrid - £75m - Man United or Fabregas - Inter Milan - £60m - Arsenal
Just try a few out yourself before you start blogging and in no time you can be as good as Sportingo. Why not be creative and throw in words like ‘wonderkid’ or ‘megastar’. It’ll make all the difference.
Now, if you’ll excuse me we’re going to sit in the corner and weep at how crap we are.
What a shame some football blogs have now become more interested in hits than catering for their readers. One blog which I used to read all the time was Whoateallthepies.
I used to comment from time to time but now you have to go through a registration process to do so. I don’t particularly want to do that, I don’t want to be a statistic used when selling advertising on the site (and it’s now looking more and more like Times Square every day - how long until ads mid-post?).
I used to also read the blog in my RSS reader but they’ve recently changed and now only provide a truncated feed. I have now deleted it from my RSS reader - if they start providing a full feed again I’ll happily re-subscribe. I mean, it’s not like it’s difficult to track the number of subscribers to your feed.
I realise there are probably people to pay and all that but blogs used to be easy to read and easy to contribute to. More and more them are making it difficult, which is a pity.
I do like the content on Whoateallthepies, I just don’t like the way I’m being forced to read it.
Dear other football blogs,
nobody gives a shit about WAGS. Well, that’s a lie. Some people do but they’re the same people who watch Big Brother and buy magazines like OK Weekly!
If I go to a football blog I want to read about football, not some semi-clad bimbo who’s famous only because she’s shagging a Premiership player. It’s not as if there aren’t enough places on the internet to see pictures of girls. Why do you feel the need to cheapen your website with such irrelevant trash?
By giving oxygen to this most modern of phenomena, people being famous for doing nothing, you are ensuring that they won’t go away. The more publicity they get the happier they are.
Maybe it’s good for hits and maybe that’s all you want. The Sun gets more readers than any other newspaper in Britain but nobody would ever try and defend it for its quality. I don’t give a shit what Wayne Rooney’s mallet faced girlfriend bought in the shops or what John Terry’s latest girlfriend/wife/mistress did last week. I care about football.
So write about WAGs if you want but if you do you associate your site, and the rest of your writing no matter how good it might be, with vapid, trivial rubbish.
yours,
Left Back