Many Positive Reasons For Being A Sports Writer

21. September 2015 · Comments Off on Many Positive Reasons For Being A Sports Writer · Categories: Blogging, Training Courses · Tags: , , , ,
Many Positive Reasons for Being a Sportswriter

Look for these type of teasers to find freelance sportswriter gigs” “We’re Looking for Freelance Writers to Help Us Cover LSU Football & More ”  Photo via 1130thetiger.com in 2013

If you’re looking for a new writing opportunity – either freelance, part-time or full-time – there are many positive reasons why being a sports writer might be the right ticket for you.

First, however, you’ll need to meet one, or both, of the following requirements:

  • You have writing skills.
  • You like sports.

A combination of both creates an ideal situation. Sports enthusiasts envy sports writers. You’re close to the action; you get to interview coaches and athletes; your name is in print (or online or in other media outlets such as television, radio, etc.) and you can earn some extra income.

Sports writing on a freelance or part-time basis won’t take up too much of your time. In most cases, you’ll be asked to attend and cover a local football or basketball game during the week and report the results.

However, there are other opportunities in writing sports profiles or feature pieces.

Many times in my sports writing career, I could easily find other sports article ideas that I could pitch to newspapers and magazines (before the Internet, mind you). Some of these included articles about sports injuries; health and diet as it related to athletes; how to select the right sports equipment (golf clubs; racquetball and tennis racquets, etc.) and how to build your own basketball court; racquetball court, etc.

Now, with many online publication and blogs, there is even a greater need and opportunity to be a freelance sports writer. Blogs need content in order to earn higher rankings in search engines and increase readership. More readers equates into more blog advertisers as businesses are happy to pay for an ad that gets their business in front of more potential customers.

For more information on how to earn extra money by being a freelance, part-time or full-time sports writer, check out our Udemy course at https://udemy.com/sports-writer.

Bitly is More Than a Link Shortening Tool

10. February 2015 · Comments Off on Bitly is More Than a Link Shortening Tool · Categories: Blogging, Mountain Woods Media · Tags: , ,

bitly is more than a link shortening toolThere are plenty of tools we like to use when it comes to development and marketing our apps, but since Valentine’s Day is approaching we thought we’d highlight a particular service that we really “love.”

bitly.

In a nutshell, bitly (http://bitly.com) is a free link shortening service allowing users to take a long link (for an article, blog, app, etc.) and make it into a shorter one. This is a valuable tool for Twitter users, who are limited to 140 characters per Tweet. You can also use the same short link in other social media avenues such as Facebook, Google + etc., and be consistent in your link building and sharing efforts.

For example, let’s say we wanted to share a link to our game in Twitter, Facebook, etc. Here’s the long link to our game “The Trout Family Swim and Fish Adventure” located in iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trout-family-swim-fish-adventure/id675169950?mt=8

However, with bitly, we can shorten the link to this:

http://bit.ly/1CqdOJ9

See the huge difference? We shortened the 81-character link to 21 characters.

Now, let’s take it one step further. When you sign up for a free bitly account, you can customize your bitly links. Therefore, our short link to our fishing game:

http://bit.ly/1CqdOJ9

…can be changed to this or to anything we’d like:

http://bit.ly/troutgame

How cool is that?

In addition, bitly saves all your shortened links and tracks clicks to your bitly links.

Tracking your clicks is extremely important in order to gauge what your fans and followers are clicking; what day; time of day, etc. Recently, we discovered our Sunday clicks aren’t that great, so we might change things up a bit on Sunday in order to earn better engagement. Also, bitly highly recommends A/B testing with your links http://bit.ly/1EVoW1H.

There are other bitly alternatives, such as:

* Google http://goo.gl/

* Tiny URL http://tinyurl.com/

* Ow.ly http://ow.ly/url/shorten-url (which is also available within Hootsuite).

Which link shortener do you use?

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