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NASA
we're not kids anymore.
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
YOU ARE THE REASON
⁂
Kaledo Art
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
pixel skylines
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
Three Goblin Art
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Today's Document
$LAYYYTER
Andulka
tannertan36
sheepfilms
Origami Around
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Estonia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Spain
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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@matchchatblog
A sneak peak as MatchChat gets a returf
Hi guys,
This week our groundsman (Lead designer) @nfrmn has been working on the 'new pitch' at MatchChat.
In other words, we are redesigning the product to make it even easier for fans to use Matchchat on the sites they love :)
Here's a sneak peak ...
It's only a glimpse for now but tweet & e-mail and let us know what you think!
@matchchat
George
NEW: Fan profiles & Notifications (and more...)
When there's football fans signing-up to MatchChat every day, back at HQ we have to be on top of our game, and so all of the work we do here drives into creating an amazing product.
Today we have released several new features including Fan Profiles and Notifications.
New Fan Profiles
We've made it super easy for fans to edit everything on their profile, from the @handle to the profile photo. The coolest bit: fans can now set a favourite team on their profile!
Notifications
Fans now receive an e-mail notification when someone replies to their comment or comments on the same article.
We noticed that 99% of fans leave a comment on an article but then never return to that same article - so they never get to see the reactions to their comment - that's not cool!
Let me know what you think and watch this space as we release even MORE features today that I will update you on very soon!
George
@georgebettany
Article ideas for your twiddling thumbs
Article page design and where you should position the Mathcchat plugin
Designing your webpage is as important as a football club drawing up blueprints for its new stadium. Clubs like Bayern Munich would never want to play in a stadium where the seats are broken and small chunks of plaster fall from the upper tiers, and the roofing is a giant pigeon's nest. Similarly, nobody would want to revisit a website with a tacky page design. Like a new stadium must match its club's ambitions, your page design must match your passion. It doesn't necessarily have to be an Allianz Arena but, at the same time, it shouldn't be a ballpark that is home to a Sunday league team, either.
The buzzwords we are going to use today are consistency, aesthetically pleasing, and identity.
Your webpage should be designed in such a way that you must be able to direct the readers eye to the most important information first and so forth.
The ground rules are very simple. Think of a webpage as your business card. A business card would usually have a name, job title and contact information. If you print all of the above in a linear style, you will direct the reader's eye from top to bottom. Now, if you play around with the font size and split the contact info into two neat columns: you will end up with a snazzy new design, like the one below.
Now let us graduate to webpage design. Same game but different rules. Lets use the Guardian news website as a case study. The Guardian's football section aligns all its opinionated articles in a straight file at right. The news articles are stacked from top to bottom. So the Guardian is directing a reader's eye from top to bottom and his/her gaze would eventually drift to the right to read the football columns.
And do you notice the sub-sections at the top of the page? each section has a unique colour. Welcome to colour coding 101. The more colourful a page is, the more aesthetically pleasing it will be. But you need to maintain the same consistency for every webpage on the site. And you need to pull it off without compromising on your identity. Because you will be shooting yourself in the foot if you run a certain London club fansite, but are using a lot of red in your webpages.
Next, use a dominant image for your lead article. So that when a user lands on your site, his/her attention will first turn to the article with the biggest image. And, at the same time, don't over do it by using more images than necessary.
Here is a tip from our in-house programmer and designer Nabil Freeman: "It is mentally jarring to look at a website with an asymmetrical page design. You must find the right balance. Avoid using too many images at right and left of a page. Keep it organised and balanced."
And, finally, what is the best place to position the Matchchat comments plugin?
I agree, it is a bit tempting for website owners to highlight the related articles section at the end of an article page.
But that would mean pushing back the comments section further down below. By doing this you are not only discouraging your readers to comment, you are also alienating them.
To set things right, anchor the Matchchat plugin just below the article and your readers wouldn't need any prompting to share their valuable feedback.
Leela Prasad
@theblcksheep
Forza Italian Football | Welcome to MatchChat
We’d like to welcome our good friends at Forza Italian Football to MatchChat.
FIF is arguably the largest English-speaking site to exclusively cover Italian football on the web. David and his team have designed a site “For fans, by fans” with true Serie A supporters generating blogs, videos and news stories every day.
With MatchChat on FIF, we help to connect the fans that write the stories to the fans that read them. Whilst FIF provide the quality content, MatchChat gives each fan an identity and our platform gives fans a place to interact and connect around that content.
It’s exciting stuff working with partners like FIF because they believe in connecting fans around the beautiful game as much as we do here at MatchChat HQ!
- George
The news trending on Forza Italian Football today is that Chelsea have had another Cavani bid rejected! - take a look here: http://forzaitalianfootball.com/2013/06/chelsea-have-another-cavani-bid-rejected/
Four things you should do this summer
The school's out for summer. Whilst the sun shines bright over a lush green football pitch, the water drops from the sprinklers glisten like precious pearls on every blade of grass.
When the news has dried up and there is nothing to draw from the well, except the occasional transfer rumour, every football blogger leans on his purple prose (like the intro above) to keep the website running.
If your website isn't fan specific and covers everything under the sun, then I got news for you.
Start a transfer rumour
How the modern transfer window rumours work, lesson number 37. Please sit comfortably ;)
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
An ITK on Twitter will start a rumour based on some loose information which has been around for a while.
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
Eg, saying Carlos Tevez has agreed personal terms with Juventus. Not too wild a claim because Tevez has been linked with Juve for years.
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
This could also be done with Tevez to AC Milan or literally anyone to Juve, given previous links.
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
Others then see the ITK tweet and copy and paste it, rather than RTing. This makes it look like a real story is building.
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
People then rush to put bets on the move. Tevez is now odds-on to sign for Juventus skybet.com/football/trans…
— Sport Witness (@Sport_Witness)
June 5, 2013
Regarding the last tweet, make sure you are on any one of the betting website's affiliate programme before starting a transfer rumour. You wouldn't want to miss out on all those betting referrals, when fans folk to put their monies on Tevez moving to Juve, would you?
Build fake Facebook walls
Sportskeeda.com popularized the use of fake Facebook walls of all the big names in football.
It pulls in a huge amount of readers and piques fan interest when shared on social networking sites. And this your big ticket to indulge in a bit of tomfoolery without the fear of reprisals (like starting a transfer rumour).
The Wall Machine is one way of generating, effortlessly a fake Facebook wall. There are many more easy-to-use programs on the internet, that will help you build your own fake FB wall.
Get on Reddit and Quora
These websites are the best sources of information outside mainstream media sites. Reddit gives you the power to mine volumes of data and, more than often, it throws up some interesting facts. It helps you to generate more ideas for an article you could work on.
For example, news of the Bring Ronaldo Home campaign first broke out on Reddit. After a little bit of sleuthing, I published an article questioning the motives of those running this crowd funded campaign. Reddit users called the campaign a sham and drew similarities with the KONY 2012 initiative by calling it RONY 2013.
Reddit gave me an exclusive news story that no mainstream news media site would have never stumbled upon first. I got down to the bottom of it and the article got a handsome 4k reads.
Reddit can also be used for sleuthing information similar to Quora.
For example, before the league season ended, I was planning on doing an article on relegation battles. I posted the question, "What was the greatest relegation battle in the premier league history?", on Quora.
I got some pretty decent answers from other users. If Wikipedia, Google and your mates don't have the answers then Quora does.
Outside club football
Football isn't just the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A. There is more to it than cash-rich European clubs. The UEFA U21 and U19 tournaments are currently underway and it gives you a good glimpse at upcoming players. All the major European clubs sent their scouts to cover these two competitions. You may not be physically present in Tel Aviv, but that shouldn't stop you from writing your own scouting reports.
And the big summer bonus is that the Confederations Cup begins this month on 15th, and you have some big teams like Brazil, Italy, Spain and Mexico competing for the same honours. This competition should keep you busy for most of June. Keep pedaling the good old Match Reports, Five Things We Learned, and Player Ratings. You can keep milking it till you have exhausted all the list of topics you could cover. And then there are the 2014 World Cup Qualifiers. Match previews, reports etc. you know the drill.
Happy blogging!
Leela Prasad
@theblcksheep
Best Manchester United fan websites (Part-1)
Republik of Mancunia
It would be a crime to tell the story of Republik of Mancunia without first revisiting the 1998 World Cup in France.
It is well documented that David Beckham was sent off against Argentina for kicking Diego Simone. England lost the game on penalties and were knocked out of the World Cup. Beckham was vilified by the press, and his effigy was hung outside a London pub.
This hatred against Manchester United players continued into the next millennium; when the likes of Paul Scholes, Beckham, Gary Neville and Nicky Butt took to the field for England in international games, 'Stand up If you hate Man U' was chanted from the stands by the England fans.
This made the Mancunian movement even stronger. Scott, who runs the Republik of Mancunia, says that those living in Manchester feel they are more Mancunian than they are English.
However, this did not lead to the founding of Republik of Mancunia, but, what it achieved was, it laid the foundations for the fan site and united all the Mancunians under one common banner.
The members of the Republik of Mancunia firmly believe that UNITED > England.
Started as a Manchester United news site in 2006, it evolved into an opinionated site with strong views on everything that is United. It is primarily updated by Scott, but you can also read posts from other guest bloggers, too. What makes ROM so special is that it doesn't hold back from criticising the club and its players. Every Man Utd fan should have this Mancunian site on their bookmarks.
United Rant
United Rant is probably the best Manchester United fan website in the country. Ask Scott from ROM, he will testify to this fact before a United fans jury.
Rant was born at a time when the Glazers were buying off the controlling shares at the club, and United were faltering in the league and in Europe. In the 2004-2005 season, Rant's owner and editor Ed Barker famously called for Sir Alex Ferguson's head in a fan column that was published in the Guardian newspaper.
That was in the past and it wasn't even half as bad as the fan who unfurled the infamous 'Tara Fergie' banner. Today, the Rant is a platform for deconstructive analysis of the best supported team in the world, Manchester United. They release a podcast every week and publish a to quality online fanzine every month.
Rant is not a site for somebody who are looking for their daily fix of transfer rumours, funny GIF's, and top 5 lists. It is a niche website that influences the way a United fan thinks, and it allows them to see things from a different perspective.
Rant also encourages budding writers to get in touch with them and get their views published. Rant has a huge following in Manchester and outside England.
Manutd24
It is hard to put an exact date on when Manutd24 was founded. Probably due to the site owners own admittance that he was far too lazy to update the site in its first year.
Despite spending its initial years in doldrums, it gained mass following sometime in the 2010 season. Those were the times when Michael Carrick was being slated from left, right and center by the United fans. Manutd24 was, probably, the only blog that stood by Carrick from the outset.
In their own words, Manutd24 want to stand out from the thousands of Manchester United fan blogs.
"Just be different. And good. People appreciate good. It’s been a few years since then and we’ve been working hard to achieve our aim. This is what we promise you. Or, at least, try to promise you:
1. Retro features, opinion pieces, analysis and some fictional stuff, if you’re lucky.
and…
2. No news. No transfer rumours. Not here."
Their retrospective series is a hit among its readers. It isn't just a blast from the past series; it takes you down the nostalgia lane, where you can reminisce United's past heroes and events that made United the team it is today. Its opinion pieces carry incredible in-depth analysis and even the minutest details are tightly scrutinized under Manutd24's magnifying glass. In a nutshell, Manutd24 is the website to read for United fans looking for something different.
Leela Prasad
@theblcksheep
How do Empire of the Kop keep fans on their site for longer?
The new Liverpool kit was launched yesterday and it’s unusual style has split the Liverpool fans. Antoine, the founder of EOTK, decided to put it to the fans:
Not one to criticise kits but in my opinion next season’s away kit has to be the ugliest one I ever saw. What do you think?
And that was it - short and sweet but it captured the attention of many Liverpool fans! Here's a snippet ...
What's so clever about this approach is that Antoine turns his site into a two-way channel where his fans directly contribute to the article through MatchChat. The platform also gives the fans an arena to interact with each other.
In doing this EOTK see an increase in 3 things:
Fans interact with the site and with each other so stay around for longer
It's also proven that fans are more inclined to share content that they have contributed to which drives more social referrals and traffic
Fans become more loyal to the EOTK brand and community which increases retention
We love that MatchChat has the power to connect EOTK to their fans- Mix it up like Antoine and you will see the effects!
- George
@georgebettany
How to get your readers to interact with the Matchchat plugin
The comments section below an article is the only gateway between a writer and their readers. It acts as an anchor to an article page. Comments do not weigh you down but, instead, they boost your site profile; so the more the merrier. How do you encourage your readers to comment and interact with other readers on your article page?
Well, writing about controversial issues is one way to get users to flex their fingers and give the writer a piece of their mind.
But comments left unmoderated could be dangerous.
Users could throw you under the bus for being a bit too vocal about a contentious issue. But then again that is acceptable behavior, though expletives could turn off other readers.
Matchchat can help site owners rein in such readers, who are abusing their power to post a fair comment.
Read about our new and improved admin panel (dugout) here
I digress, the easier way to increase the user activity on your article page is to write something interesting that prompts a reader to reach for their keyboards and string together a few meaningful words.
It is easier said than done. Not to worry, Matchchat has already done half the job for you. The Matchchat comments plugin is easy to install on your site and, more importantly, it is easy for the users to signup and start commenting. And the plugin allows the readers to interact with other readers and share their conversations on social media sites. Thus, inviting more readers to the site, and this could only mean one thing - more comments and a spike in traffic. Now you, as a site owner/writer, must live up to your end of the bargain.
If you have missed out on our previous blog post on four ways to get fans to read your articles click here
Like I have said in my previous blog posts, you must do things a bit differently to stand out. What would attract more readers than lists about Top 5/10 players of the season, transfer rumours, etc.
And when you are writing opinion pieces, always end with something that would make the reader think. More importantly, don't close the argument. Keep it open for debate. This should generate user comments and increase interactivity on the site. Thereby, bridging the gap between the writer and his/her audience.
More on website page design, and what is the best place to position the comments plugin, will soon follow in the next blog post.
Leela Prasad
@theblcksheep
New feature: The dugout a.k.a. admin panel
Site admins can directly view and moderate comments.
The Matchchat plugin is always evolving. The latest addition to the comments plugin is the new and improved admin panel. We have removed all the useless clutter and hassles that comes with moderating user comments, and streamlined the process through an easy and user friendly admin panel.
Now all the tools that a site owner would need to make his work easier is under one roof i.e. the dugout.
The dugout (admin panel) gives site owners complete control over the user comments. Now they can moderate all the comments, view flagged comments and take appropriate action, and access user details at the click of a button.
Access to user details at the click of a button.
If you are snowed under or experiencing a high volume of comments, you could appoint more admins, moderators and counter the flow.
Add more admins and moderators.
What is in the pipeline?
Matchchat will be rolling out more features for the dugout such as a real time comments section, admins can view where the user activity is taking place and can upvote/downvote comments directly from the dugout.
Leela Prasad
@theblcksheep
Installing MatchChat gets even easier!
In the last week we’ve been working on improving our installation process to make it super easy to get MatchChat on your site.
MatchChat is a football-specific plug-in that gives your fans a platform to interact and engage around your content and you can now install it on your site in just a few clicks.
So if you’re a site owner with an audience of football fans, click the big green 'GET MATCHCHAT' button on the top right-hand corner of this screen, register your site, follow the step-by-step instructions and the plug-in will appear instantly on your site within seconds!
George
@georgebettany
Three football sites everyone must read (part-1)
Championsleague.ca, like the elite football club competition, plays host to some of the best football leagues across Europe; bringing you news from the stands of Camp Nou, Barcelona to the frozen pitches of Petrovsky Stadium, Saint Petersburg.
Its minimalist design and tightly packaged content is a hit with the readers.
The news pieces are broken down into small, digestible chunks, and the features stories are in-dept and engaging.
With just nine regular contributors on board, co-founders, Ashley Perry and William walker-lane, are running a tight ship.
“I visit Championsleague.ca for the variety of content on offer. Their news pieces are objective and the narrative of their feature stories is easy to follow," said Matty Aston, a regular visitor to the website.
Espangol.com is mes que un sitio web. Yes! they are more than just a website. Unlike Barcelona, they don't stick with tiki-taka, their content is more diverse.
It is a website that specialises in feature articles. Its content is to the point, comprehensive and offers a fresh perspective about the La Liga. In a nutshell, Espangol.com is an English website about Spanish Football.
Espangol.com is not just about the Big Two of the La Liga; it doesn’t play favourites and provides equal coverage for all the 20 La Liga clubs.
“I am a die-hard fan of Real Betis, but it is hard to find any quality articles on Betis. Espangol.com has filled in the gap and, today, I have set Espangol’s column as my home page,” said Scott Tailford, a Betis fan from Edinburgh.
Have nothing interesting to read during the siesta? Espangol.com is just a click away.
Famouscfc.com is one of the most vocal fan sites out there that cover Chelsea FC. They are loud and passionate like the fans from the Shed End.
Their deconstructive analysis about the club is without the usual fluff that you would find in an article at any regular football club fan site.
They don’t look at everything through blue-tinted glasses; Famousfc.com gives credit where it is due (Read Rafael Benitez) and don’t hold back from critisizing one of their own.
They have a huge presence on twitter and an even higher reader base.
“They write excellent pieces about the club and, moreover, it is written by the fans for the fans, so you can feel the passion whilst reading some of their articles,” said Christopher Smith, a lifelong Blues fan.
- Leela Prasad
MatchChat announce new partnership with Empire of the Kop
We are pleased to announce we are now integrated with Empire of the Kop!
Empire of the Kop, ran by Antoine Zammit, is one of the biggest and best websites dedicated to Liverpool Football Club, boasting nearly 450,000 Twitter followers and close to 80,000 Facebook likes.
EOTK is now using the matchchat platform to allow their fans to share and interact around their articles, after they downloaded our brand new commenting plug in.
So now, EOTK fans can share their thoughts with the LFC community on the Suarez 'bitegate' affair, Rodgers' summer signings and much much more.
We hope that by using matchchat, EOTK can continue to lead the way as one of the best performing football sites on social media. And we're sure they will!
The whole team at MatchChat hope the partnership is a long and prosperous one which helps both ourselves and Empire of the Kop further develop in the future.
Run a football website? Interested in integrating with MatchChat? Feel free to get in touch
-James
Moving away from weekly newsletters
Sending out weekly newsletters, via email, to your subscribers is, more or less, similar to sending a telegram in 2013. We have moved on from reading newspapers and blowing on a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee, to swiping our fingers over touchscreen devices while waiting in a queue at Starbucks.
What is a newsletter? It is nothing but a weekly roundup of all the articles published on your site.
Weekly newsletters are dull to look at (links, links and more links), and easy to ignore in an inbox filled with unread mails. You must be a dinosaur if you are still relying on newsletters to connect to your reader base. Why not shake things up on the design front?
Issuu.com allows users to create a virtual magazine/newspaper/book. So, instead of a weekly newsletter, why not send it out as a weekly magazine? To begin with, you'll need a design software to draw a dummy of your magazine.
Adobe Indesign and Microsoft Publisher are some of the professional and easy-to-use softwares in the market. But they could be expensive to get your hands on. If money is not an issue, then I would strongly recommend you to buy Indesign. No prior training is required; It is pretty much self explanatory, and even a baby sucking on a pacifier can play around with it.
The best alternative to Indesign is Scribus. It matches Indesign on most of the basic features, and it is FREE to download and use. On Scribus, all you have to do is upload text files, import images and, viola, you have a magazine ready for publishing. Once you are done tinkering with the text and images, save it as a pdf file and upload the pdf file on Issuu.com.
Issuu is a hit because of its interface. While turning a page it gives a flip effect, like when you are reading a book or magazine on an iPad or Kindle. Issuu also provides statistics, like how many have read your magazine, downloaded it, traffic sources, and your readers geography. Once published, you can share it via email, twitter, facebook or embed it on your website.
Happy publishing!
Written by
Leela Prasad
follow me on twitter for more tips @theblcksheep
Five tools that will improve your blog
Snipping tool
The size of an image matters. When I say size, I do not mean the image dimensions, but the unit measurement - bytes - used in computing parlance to describe an unit of digital information. You are using images to illustrate an article, but you may be unknowingly clogging up the readers bandwidth.
The larger the size of an image, the slower it takes to load a webpage. Speeds may vary from user to user depending on their broadband speed. Assume, for the sake of argument, the average Joe’s broadband speed is 1 mbps. If your home page has five images, each five megabytes in size, it would take about 25 secs to just load only the images. When you add text, flash videos, and banner ads to the home page, the size inflates. But, that is just in theory, Internet service providers always under deliver on their promises of a high speed connection.
Enter snipping tool. If your computer runs on windows 7 professional and its above versions, it comes bundled with a free software for downsizing images, both in size and shape, called snipping tool. It will compress the image size from megabytes to kilobytes. Smaller size means faster load times, and less number of users pulling out their hairs in frustration.
Then there is also the easy way. Upload the images you wish to downsize to Facebook and, later on, download the same image from Facebook. Facebook automatically compresses large images to mere kilobytes, hence your work is cut into half.
Tactics board
The good folks at Eplindex released a free tactics board app. It is a nifty tool for bloggers with an inclination towards the finer details of a football match. What formation did the manager use, how was the goal created, and, most importantly, tracking a player’s movements during a game. All the above can be easily explained using the tactics board app. There are many free-to-use apps in the market, but Eplindex’s app has a definite edge over the rest. Because the app comes with preloaded squad lists from the last five seasons.
Once you select the season and the team, it automatically lists the 25 squad players registered to play in the league for that season. All one needs to do is drag and drop them on to the board. And then there are the usual lines, arrows, circles, triangles, and all other geometrical shapes that a tactics analyst would need. In a nutshell, this makes other tactics boards look like cavemen drawings.
Stats repositories
Espnsoccernet, Whoscored.com, and Squawka.com are some of the websites that spring to mind. They are free to use, and are the usual go-to repositories for stats. Another option is FourFourTwo’s stats zone app, which is available for free download on iOS devices. It offers stats in real-time and the sheer variety of options is mind numbing.
Interactive images
Thinglink.com allows you to create interactive images for your site. You can embed info, audio files, videos and much more inside an image. This makes your article look more lively and interesting. Just hover your mouse on the image above. The more creative you can get, the more the chances of attracting unique readers.
Free and legal images
Creative Commons and Wikimedia are useful sources for downloading and using images, without the fear of violating copyright laws. Though, the latest images you might be looking for may not be available, but you’ll always remain on the right side of the law.
Written by
Leela Prasad
follow me on twitter (@theblcksheep) for more gyan.
Four ways to get fans to read your article
Infographics - data journalism on steroids
This is, by far, the best way to visually present your ideas. Readers who stumble onto your site via social media networks or those who are regular visitors, maybe put off by the sheer length of an article. If you strip down your flowing purple prose and other fluff, and spin all the facts into a neat infographic, there is more chance of your visitors absorbing most of the info.
One doesn't need to be an expert at using photoshop. There are free online apps out there to help you design an infographic, without compromising on the quality or variety of options that photoshop offers.
Take easel.ly for example, it allows users to create an infographic from scratch or you could modify one of the many templates available on the site. It is easy to use; the drag and drop feature allows you to play around a bit and it allows one to modify their saved designs later on.
If you are looking for something more serious, visit infogr.am. This is a notch above easel.ly in terms of design and features on offer. But, it is as easy to use as easel.ly. One could condense all the facts in to aesthetically pleasing data charts. This is data journalism on steroids. Match stats or player stats can be neatly compiled and presented in any one of the many templates readily available.
Headlines matter
It doesn't matter how good you are at writing or how many hours you put in to analyzing a match; it all boils down to how many read the article. Click-through rate is a term used by advertising companies to determine how many readers are redirected to another page, after clicking on an advertisement on a site. If we apply the same logic to blogs: how many click to read an article, depending on how much attention grabbing a headline is?
We are basically applying the same principles, applied by newspapers and news websites, to blogs. But you don't have to disrespectful like the Sun was to Roy Hodgson. Take Upworthy.com for example, they pitch YouTube videos with awesome headlines that would make anyone click on the headline, just to find out more, out of curiosity. Upworthy doesn't create their own content, they have curators scouring YouTube for videos that send out an important social message. In their own words, their aim is to make important stuff go as viral as a video of some idiot surfing off his roof.
Which is a better headline?
The Olympic marathon runner who outran his own murder
Or
Marathon runner escapes captors
Take a look at Upworthy's 10 most shared videos from last year. You'll get an idea about how powerful are headlines.
Lists are here to stay
Love it or hate it, more and more websites are currently adopting top 10/top 5 lists to bring in more readers. Even mainstream media websites like the Guardian uses lists. "10 Things we learned from the premier league this weekend" and "5 things we learned from England-Montenegro game" are some of the examples that the guardian football section uses to get their point across. For some strange inexplicable reason, readers are more attracted to lists than anything more.
Uniqueness to spike readers interest
For another strange inexplicable reason, readers are not exhausted with the fad of list based articles. This isn't going to die, at least, not just yet. But there are people out there looking for unique content. This section is best left to your imagination, and how unique you can make your content depends on you. For example, instead of sticking to top 5/10 lists, you could recreate the same list by embedding tweets, GIF images, and videos into your article.
For example, you can embed tweets from football players, journalists and others by using a simple html code. You can write an article about a football match by saying, for example, "El Clasico dissected in five tweets". Embed the tweets and start writing away i.e building on what the tweet is about.
Written by Leela Prasad
For more tips follow me on twitter
8 THINGS YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT MATCHCHAT
Our vision at MatchChat is to connect football fans all over the world (you probably already knew that)
Instead of trying to get millions of fans to come to MatchChat, we take MatchChat to the fans, all over the web, no matter where they are. How do we do that? Go to no. 3 …
MatchChat is a plug-in that can easily be set-up on any football site, whether it’s an official club website or an independent and unofficial blog, and once it’s up and running MatchChat powers all of the social activity on that site. For more info on the plug-in visit our new site
We’ve been overwhelmed with the demand for the plug-in so we’ve had to strengthen our squad in the January transfer window.
The MatchChat team has doubled in size! Click here to see our dream team. We’re always looking for more players too so if you’re interested in being a part of the MatchChat team get in touch.
The live match centre that we developed during our time on the ignite100 accelerator programme is now a premium feature that we provide alongside the FREE MatchChat plug-in. Why? Go to no.7 ...
The match centre is a fantastic feature and a great product but we couldn’t ignore what our partners and most importantly our fans were telling us. The plug-in solves problems for our partners and our fans love being a part of the MatchChat network!
We’ve just launched our new site that tells you all about the new MatchChat plug-in so let us know what you think about the new design :)