Football bloggers are (usually) intimately familiar with Google - their first blog was probably on Blogger, their first ad network was probably AdSense and their first concern in getting traffic was to get links to their site so that they can get traffic from Google’s search engine. You probably use Analytics, iGoogle and Google Reader as well, while some of the more entrepreneurial bloggers have used Adwords at one time or the other.

So how else can Google help you? By sending you more traffic (and quality traffic at that) from Google News.

I’ve done a whole writeup on how you can get your blog / website listed in Google News - have a read and hopefully it will help you get more readers.

I don’t want to obsess about MyFootballClub. I really don’t. So, for once and for all, I’ll just put my thoughts about the whole thing into words and hope that I can just link back to this post in the future as opposed to repeating this rant again.

The MyFC team are incredibly marketing-savvy - they took a passion common to all football fans - the desire to control your team’s fortunes - and made it into an affordable theme-park ride. As all theme-park rides, there are going to be some hiccups at the start and that’s acceptable and understood.

However, MyFC is also a business and as they become more established, they have a reputation to maintain and defend. Their marketing message is perfected and quite strong, so if they can do a passable job at delivering on the ‘promises’ their marketing makes, they should be raking in the moolah with enough to spare for a new car for each team member each year.

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Football fans are idiots. Passionate without a cause, loyal to a fault, fools in the face of truth and stupid enough to fall for the same tricks every time, every year.

To quote Sean Ingle (he wrote this 3 years ago):

After all, you remain hooked on a sport that has, over the past decade, become as competitive as a F1 warm-up lap - while at the same time taking ever-larger chunks out of your salary. Smart people would stand up to such exploitation. Football fans prefer to revel in their “hardcore” commitment.

Even if a match is shunted to some unholy hour to accommodate Sky, you think nothing of travelling hundreds of miles to sit in a stadium with all the atmosphere of a wake, to show loyalty to your club. The same club that’s always thinking of ingenious new ways to bleed you dry.

When it comes to football, your rationality goes awol. You worship players who are at best indifferent to you, and at worst despise you. If a referee makes a dubious decision against your team, he’s a wanker or a cheat. And if a journalist writes something you disagree with, he carries a vendetta.

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