Joshua Ray and The 405 Producers

The key to be successful in anything that you do is to learn from those around you. Especially learning from those around you that specialize in the same thing that you do. If your competitor does a promotion that just tanks, it’s smart to learn from them and not try that same promotion. However if they have success doing something you don’t steal it from them, you take it, tweak it, and make it better. You still learned from them though. You can do the same thing when you’re starting a blog. You can find someone with a similar blog and ask them for advice to improve your blog.  Basically you’re adopting their blog when you do this. I adopted a sports blog called the 405 Producers. I first heard about this blog when I was working cleaning pools this summer. My partner and I used to listen to the Sports Animal when in the car driving from pool to pool. Their 5am-9am show the Morning Animal was talking about their producers blog, the 405 Producers. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I heard about that blog every morning all summer long. So when I needed to adopt a blog similar to my sports blog you can imagine the first one that came to my mind.

Little did I know when I contacted the Sports Animal to interview one of the guys that blogs for the 405 Producers that I would get a UCO alum that took this exact same class and the reason he got into blogging. His name Joshua Ray, and when originally emailed me back the first thing he said was, “is this for Clark’s class?”  Josh is currently the head of the Sports Animal website. He got started blogging two years ago while in Clark’s class. He also took his twitter class too he said. I’d like to take a quick second and plug that twitter class that’s coming up in the next intercession. You can enroll for it later this month talk with Clark or Heather your advisor for more information. Josh along with Michael Doughty are both in charge of the blog with other people contributing to it. The blog is there for them to share his personal views on OU, OSU, and the Thunder. The geographic location is Oklahoma City, their located on Northwest Expressway in the Sullivan group building across the street from the Buffalo Wild Wings.

While the point of blogging is to communicate your thoughts or views, what is the point of doing that if you’re not reaching the people? So the number of followers or viewers you have is critical especially if you try to make money off your sight with advertisements. The 405 Producers averages 300-400 readers per day. Most of the people that follow the blog are listeners of the Sports Animal. They have a link on the Sports Animal website that directs people to their blog. The traffic varies day to day based on how busy the day is in the sporting world. Right now it’s crazy with college football and Thunder basketball starting. Then comes the ever important question does your blog make you money? The blog itself does not make money. However Josh does get paid by the station to keep the blog up. If he was to ever make money off of the blog with advertisements he would have to take the link off the Sports Animal website. So since they are paying him, he has deadlines that he has to make. Josh blogs because he just loves the whole process of blogging. He loves thinking of different story ideas and then the whole process of blogging. He especially loves stories where he has to do a lot of research over stats and past results. It’s just fun putting all the pieces together and that creates for a great story.

         

Now more about the blog. The 405 Producers is unique because everyone gets to hear the opinions of their big time talents on the station like Jim Traber and Dusty Dvoracek when they tune into the Sports Animal, but what about the producers? They actually are the people who write the show for the on-air talent. The blog really just gives the producers an outlet to voice our opinions that they always don’t get to do on the shows. There are strengths and weaknesses to every blog for this one the strengths are “we learned from the best in professor Clark!“ Josh said the strength is there is a number of guys writing for this blog. So their readers don’t have to listen to just Michael and Josh. For the weaknesses he said that blogspot is “VERRRYYY” user friendly, but I would say it’s very basic. He also said to text him about why they still use Blogspot and I never got around to it, but I am interested why. On a cool note we both use the same background for our blogs. I think that’s personally pretty cool. His advice seemed pretty similar of a teacher I have in class. I wonder why? “BLOG BLOG BLOG. That’s the key. Build your own network with social media. Get your stories out there for people to easily find it. “

What Josh likes about his sight is that he can voice his opinion. That’s the main reason Michael and him started doing this. Plus he just loves writing. The dislike part was tough for him to think of. The only thing he could come up with is that he likes having pictures on the blog and that they don’t always have access to as many pictures as he would like.

 In conclusion I took a lot away from this, but mainly I learned that blogging is just telling a story to a bunch of readers. It’s adding yourself to the story.