The NFL season is in full swing.
Halfway through the year the teams are starting to show how good they are going to be. The best teams in the league are separating themselves from the others.
What always seems to be happen is that a handful of teams do well nearly every year while others seem to struggle nearly every year. The great thing about the NFL is that it is possible to have one great year mixed in with years of mediocrity, but for the most part there are consistent teams that do well and those that do poorly.
Why is that?
It comes down to ownership and manager. The structures in the NFL vary a bit. You have owners that also act as general managers (Dallas). You have owners that hire general managers. There are different situations at nearly every team.
It seems like the best teams have a good general manager that understands how to consistently put a team on the field that will win even as players depart. The one thing that is given in the NFL is that 100% of players get hurt and 99% of players are retired because nobody wants them anymore. It’s a harsh reality for careers that come to an end too quickly.
There are lessons to learn from the NFL that relate to running a successful blog. Here are three of those lessons.
Lesson #1 – Great Players for the Team Are Better Than Great Players
Even in blogging it’s about the team. Who is involved with the team? It starts with the owners, managers and employees of your business. Everybody that shows enthusiasm to be involved in the blog needs to have a part in the success of the blog. Now, there might be some writers that are stars, but the focus should not be on the stars. It should focus on the success of the blog and the business first. If it’s the other way around it will not be a sustainable success.
Lesson #2 – What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
We’ve talked about this before and it’s not an original idea.
The best GMs in the league understand that the NFL is always changing. Today, teams might throw the ball all over the lot, but it just takes one team to do it entirely different to change things. If a team does it different and has success then the entire dynamic of the league will change. It’s a copycat league, but if you can find success doing it differently you can usually find yourself with a good run of a few years of success. Then it will be time to change again and innovate.
Blogging is about innovating too. There will always be the basic post formats that always work, but it’s important to keep innovating and moving forward. You’re starting to see more videos and more graphics these days. That’s a shift in the natural dynamic of blogging. Innovative bloggers are looking for ways to build on prior success so they can get past where they are today.
Lesson #3 – Consistent Mindset
The best teams in the NFL have GMs that take their time and make careful decisions. The teams that lurch around in free agency and with trading often make news in March, but never in January. There are no quick fixes in the NFL and the same is true for blogging.
There is never one post that will turn the tides of your blog. A blog builds momentum with each post. Everything builds on top of each other until a breakthrough point is reached. When you look back on the moment that led to the success you’ll realize that it was cumulation of all the hard work that led to the point of success.
There are three of the ways blogging is just like the NFL.
Can you think of anything different?
Image Credit: compujeramey