2007 Soccerlens Football Writing Competition

Soccerlens is hosting a football writing competition – if you think you’re better than the journalist / blogger hacks you force yourself to read everyday (in some cases that’s not too difficult) and if you’re interested in making a career out of writing about football, this is your best shot.

For the next two weeks (1st to 14th October), I’ll be accepting article submissions for the contest (details and rules below). Provided that your entry meets some minimum criteria, your article will definitely be published on Soccerlens.

Our panel of bloggers / judges (listed below) will evaluate all published entries and pick a winner in the 3rd week of October, with the winner receiving (amongst the usual cash prize and free shirt from Subside Sports) a paid contract to write on Soccerlens and / or full network support (1 million+ pageviews per month) in launching and promoting your own football blog.

Prizes:

The usual SL contest prizes apply – there’s a $100 cash prize plus a free footy shirt on the house courtesy of our sponsors Subside Sports.

In addition, I’ll also be using this contest to bring in a new writer on the Soccerlens payroll.

Terms will be flexible based on how much time you will spend writing for us, however the value of that contract will mostly depend on how good a writer you are.

In short, a good writer may earn $X per article (or per month), but a great writer could earn $2X or $3X.

While the outright winner will get a contract offer, the top 3 (or 5) submissions will also have the option of getting financial assistance in starting / promoting their own blogs as part of the network of blogs we’re running. If you want to start your own football blog and you would benefit from the support of an established network in securing advertising deals and in promoting your site without giving up any of your site revenue, then this is an excellent opportunity for you to get started.

Your Submissions:

Apart from basic English and writing skills, the judges will test you on quality of writing, humor, analysis, ability to generate conversations and headline writing. Since your articles will be published on Soccerlens (and syndicated via NewsNow), we’ll have a great opportunity to test the last two elements in real time.

Article Length: Whatever length makes you achieve the best results for the criteria listed above. There’s a misconception that longer pieces do better – however a minimum of 500 words is expected, and because we don’t want book submissions, an upper limit of 2000 words will be enforced. Find your own space in between.

Topics: Write on what you’re passionate about. If it’s football history, do that. If it’s play by play for a live match, tell me and I’ll set it up for you (but you’d better be kickass 🙂 ). If it’s talking about your club, great. If there’s an issue you want to discuss, excellent.

If you’re interested in covering football celebrity gossip, or other non-playing matters, you’re welcome as well. The field is wide open (so talk about babes or technology or whatever) as long as there’s a footballing link. Be creative.

Judges:

The following bloggers were bribed to gladly agreed to be part of the judges panel. I’ll be joining them, and at the end of the competition all of us will vote for our 5 favourite articles, from which we will pick the top 3 submissions.

Rules:

1 submission per person.
All emails must be sent to contests(AT)soccerlens(dot)com with the subject ‘Writing Competition’.
If you’re taking information from somewhere, mention your sources (in-context links).
Get your facts right and use a spell checker – we’re less strict on grammar but it would be advisable to fix that too 🙂
Submissions must be sent before the deadline (midnight, October 14th) – This deadline will be ‘enforced without exceptions’, so stick to it :).
Not so much a rule as a suggestion – articles that get linked to from other sites (link bait) and / or articles that generate a lot of conversation (conversation bait) are your best bet for winning, so keep that in mind. Good writing counts, but so does being able to write something that will attract the interest of a lot of people (regardless of whether they agree or disagree).
If you’ve written for Soccerlens before (or applied for a job) or even if you still write for SL, you can still take part in the competition.

Alright then – send in your submissions at contests(AT)soccerlens(dot)com, and if you have any questions ask them here. Feel free to promote this contest on your blogs and forums as well – any mentions will be noticed and appreciated.

Submitted Entries

Please take out the time to read all submissions and comment on them.

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2007 Soccerlens Football Writing Competition

Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal