If you are the owner of a fantasy sports website or blog, you have to develop an unseemly amount of talents and abilities. From learning about search engine optimization to running a podcast, you have to approach things with a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none mentality. It is great if you have a team surrounding you, but you are most likely the man or woman running the show without much backup.
Once all of your work starts to produce positive results, however, you may feel that you can ease off of the throttle. You have gained followers, find that people are sharing your work on Twitter and you have doubled or tripled your traffic from a few months before. Time to take it easy right? Wrong. If anything, you need to start working even harder.
There is never a time where you should be writing less articles, doing less research or interacting less with you followers online. One of my favorite sayings is, “If you aren’t getting better, you are getting worse”. As a website or blog owne, I have included three traps that you need to avoid at all costs.
1. I am at the top of my game, so I can relax.
“Rappers are hungry looking at me like it’s lunchtime” Eminem
You might think you are one of the best writers or website owners around, but there is always going to somebody waiting to knock you down from the top of the totem poll. If you aren’t willing to put in the work anymore, there is somebody that will, and there is a good chance that they can do things better than you. If you have 300 people visiting your website each day, your goal should be to figure out how to get 500 people visiting your website. If you are writing 20 articles a week, you need to figure out how you are going to post 30. I was watching a Patriot’s game a few years ago, and I believe that it was Cris Collinsworth who made a comment about coach Bill Belichick that has stuck with me to this day. He said something to the effect that Belichick didn’t want to just beat you, he wanted to stick his knee down your throat and kill you. Even when you are winning, you can always do better.
2. I’m comfortable with how I have been doing things.
“What’s dangerous is not to evolve” Jeff Bezos
When I was a freshman in college in 2005, I remember someone asking me if I had heard about this thing called Facebook. Over the next couple of years, Facebook and Twitter revolutionized how we interact with people and businesses in our daily lives. Now, I would love just to post to those two platforms and reach an audience. It is easy, I understand it and I am familiar with how to connect with people using those forms of social media. Over the past year, however, I have not only overheard teenagers in a grocery store talking about how they met their boyfriends and girlfriends on Instagram, but I learned from my friends’ college-aged siblings that they solely use Instagram and have deleted their Facebook accounts. I’ll admit, I don’t get Instagram. I also don’t understand the appeal of Pinterest. Feel free to discredit me because of those statements, but I don’t lie to myself and overvalue my skills when I need to improve on something. With that being said, I do understand the value of using these tools as a platform to engage and build an audience. I think they are extremely valuable, and I am working to build my presence on each network. It would be much easier for me to avoid Pinterest and Instagram all together, but I need to evolve my usage and understanding of social media for maximum exposure.
3. I am going to just rely on my current success.
“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time” Abraham Lincoln
So let us say that ESPN found one of your articles, and you were quoted in Matthew Berry‘s Love/Hate column. Nice work, but how is that going to help you tomorrow? You will be old news by the end of the week, and you could sit there and drool over your name appearing in his article, or you can get back to work. Life and fantasy football happens one day at a time, and you need to stay focused and remain in the moment. Just like the sad old drunk in the bar who talks about being the quarterback in high school and almost winning a championship, you don’ want to be the guy or gal who reminisces about your previous glories with anyone who will listen.
You can always do more research, you can always work on sentence structure and grammar and you can always get better. I have my own definitions of success, and while I have reached several of my goals over the past year, I am no where close to being satisfied.
I know I want to get better. What about you?
Categories: Fantasy Football
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