Friday Freebie: The growth never ends
To succeed you have to keep pushing the boundaries
Welcome to the Friday Freebie and if you’re new to www.footballwriting.co.uk this is the free post coming at you every Friday as a taster of what you can find behind the paywall.
If you like what you see and enjoy what you read please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just £5 a month (£1.16 per week) which gets you 8 paid for blogs as a minimum and the 4 free ones also, not bad for your money! Or if you prefer subscribe annually which works out at £4 a month or 93p a week, just an absolute bargain especially adding in the relaunched ‘Trev Talks’ podcast.
The summer offer runs until 30th June, 30% off for a full year which makes the monthly price £3.50 for 12 months, great value I think for the amount of articles and podcasts you can hear or read.
As we hit 1st July the day after this piece is published for me that signals the real beginning of the new season. Clubs have been back in pre-season training already this week and I spent a day at The Hive on Monday for Barnet’s first day back.
Others at all levels have begun to report back ahead of a year that once again promises to be enthralling, exciting, with highs and lows and of course the potential for misery and disappointment.
As a blogger I keep the clock ticking over the summer months too, whilst some of the game hibernates for a few weeks, there is plenty going on around the country to not leave me short of writing material.
It actually gives me a little bit of time to catch up with a host of different managers to see how they think they faired last season and what they plan for over the coming months.
There are always so many different angles I can cover, people in the non-league game at all levels are keen to talk to you, they don’t get the column inches like the higher levels of the game and they are indeed ambassadors for their own club, in most cases it’s free publicity.
It has also given me time to relaunch my ‘Trev Talks’ podcast which I started over 12 months ago but found that the blogging had given me enough material but also aware that it’s another brand to add to the portfolio and something else you can find here on www.footballwriting.co.uk.
The pods are a mixture, the original plan was to be 20-30 minutes long, just enough for a coffee break or the commute to work, no time at all to be invested. Occasionally they’ll dip out to the hour mark which I believe is long enough to keep someone’s attention, there are stories and careers that just won’t fit into 20 minutes.
But, it’s not just blogs and podcasts! This month I also launched my You Tube channel which I will link below as every pod I record has both audio and video content. To begin with it will host all the lockdown videos recorded from 2020 and also others I’ve turned into blogs in the past three years, another avenue to explore and to see where that one goes.
And it doesn’t stop there either. Three years ago I began a programme writing service, as a spectator I think there is nothing worse than buying a matchday programme where it’s full of adverts, costs more than £2 and you’ve learnt nothing by the end of it!
Supporters remain, club owners and players come and go, that’s the most important thing that gets forgotten all too easily. Anyway back to this service! Each club gets their own column of a minimum 500 words per week, that’s to say no matter how many clubs I would have to write for not a single one will get the same article.
That is the selling point of why I charge for it, if I used the same piece or similar for all the clubs then that’s cheating people out of money in my eyes, not my style and never will be. The piece is then the club’s for them to do whatever they want with it, in the programme, on their website or across their social media channels.
Do I ever run out of material? Never! Always plenty to be finding out about and it’s great doing the research to learn even more about non-league that draws us along on Saturday afternoons and midweek evenings.
So, if you know a club whose looking for something extra for their matchday programme or other non-league fans that like to read about or listen to audio about the game then send them this way, not going to be disappointed are they, you’re the testament to that as you’ve reached this point!
As promised the link to the You Tube channel is below, the channel will grow over the coming weeks and months with a variety of different videos uploaded and will be great if you subscribe, there is no cost:
Sorry this is not connected with the current blog but thought you might see the funny side. My wife and I went to buy a new Vacum cleaner today she wanted the same make as previously but the only one they had was not red & black as before but Black & Amber which we both saw the funny side of. So my question now is am I the only Barnet supporter with their own a Bees vacum.