How To Be A Successful Internet Writer

We at GOI have gotten several emails about how to gain notoriety in the internet writing universe. The answer is honestly to just start writing. Quality work eventually gets noticed. In the movie Field Of Dreams, there is the famous line "if you build it, they will come." There is a beautiful truth in that statement.

Way back when, when I was in high school, I began blogging about movies and life. That material landed me a job as a film critic for the Daily Illini, a student run newspaper which acted as the primary news/entertainment publication for the University of Illinois.

A few months after my tenure with the Daily Illini ended, SexyRexy, TBO, Cubsfan4ever and myself decided to start a sports blog in the wake of the demise of FJM. Our blog began with a post I wrote about why I felt Tom Glavine was an overrated pitcher who did not particularly belong in the Hall of Fame and has since blossomed in to over 1,700 posts about sports (mostly baseball and football). Each and every post taught us more about writing and in reading our material from beginning to present, you will notice a clear evolution in our writing style and thought. Particularly, you will notice how we slowly developed into statistically minded fellows more and more sabermetrically involved in every endeavor.

The moral of the story is that if you want to be a writer, just start writing. The beauty of the era we live in is that anyone who wants to write can. Doing is the key to refining and success.Start a blog with friends, start one on your own. In time, if you produce material worth reading, people will notice. Our blog began as a small project between friends and our posts have since been featured on various sites such as Sports Illustrated, Bloomberg Media Sports and MLB Trade Rumors (amongst many others). My work on this blog also lead to a (brief) position as a sportswriter and later a position on The Hardball Times. Doing builds a resume, which leads to bigger and better things.

If nothing more, working on a blog with friends will help bring you closer to them. I strongly feel that SexyRexy, TBO, Cubsfan4ever and myself have become closer as friends as a result of our work on this blog. I think they would agree.

Let me end this post by saying thank you to everyone, including the readership, who has made this blog what it is today.