#for the amount of people who’ve commented they bought the game because of this post | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

Text

Slater case proves NRL justice is indeed blind – and just plain stupid

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/slater-case-proves-nrl-justice-is-indeed-blind-and-just-plain-stupid/

Slater case proves NRL justice is indeed blind – and just plain stupid

Handshake deal

The ESPN Sports Business reporter Darren Rovell put out an interesting tweet this week noting that Thursday was the 20th anniversary of the day that the St Louis Cardinals baseball slugger Mark McGwire – powered by steroids as it later turned out – broke the single season home-run record by belting his 70th.

The ball bounced out of one fan’s hands, bounced out of another’s and was finally caught by a 17-year old fan, Phil Ozersky, who at the time was earning chump change stacking shelves.

The Cardinals asked him for the ball and offered in return a signed bat, ball and jersey. But Ozersky wanted one more thing. Yup, he told the Cardinals he wanted to meet McGwire, shake his hand.

McGwire was too much of a big shot, busy hitting more big shots over fences, and said no. So three months later, Ozersky sold the ball for $US3.05 million, bought a house for his handicapped father, gave six-figure sums to charity, married his high-school sweetheart and went on to live happily ever after – while still driving now the car he had back then.

Ain’t sport grand?

Teaming up

Now you can call me an old “romantic” if you like, but I don’t care. See, by definition, every day that passes, big-time sports gets more “modern”, which usually means more technical, more driven by statistics, and more littered with incomprehensible jargon like “corrugated iron” and “marmalade jam”.

It means that, when you come across stories of big-time teams prospering because of embracing the old-time values, it is heart-warming. A prime case in point is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL side, who’ve come from nowhere to open their account this season by beating two of the top-ranked teams in the league, including last year’s Superbowl winners, the Philadelphia Eagles.

United: Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Jameis Winston looks for a receiver.

Photo: AP

Part of it is credited to coach Dirk Koetter doing something different in the off-season.

As reported in The New York Times: “He broke his team into groups of eight, mixing coaches with players, and had the groups hold meetings during which people took turns talking about their backgrounds or upbringing. The goal was team unity.”

Yes, I know. Players actually getting to know each other, and care about each other, beyond football!

“You play with guys but you don’t know personal details of their lives,” tight end Cameron Brate said. “It was really eye-opening. A football team is built on communication and trust and truly being able to understand where someone is coming from and being able to open up to them. It created new pathways of communication and enhanced our trust in each other.”

Everything is so old it’s new again. Next thing you know, you’ll get players truly caring about the jerseys they play for, and speaking about the clubs they’ve played for, for over a decade, in the first person, not the third person, as in: “They’ve been a great club, and really good to me.”

Just Google it

As I have said many times before, if they were holding a group 1 horse race – whatever that is – around my house, I would pull the curtains shut and call the police. I just don’t care. Still, occasionally stories arise from the racing world that pique the interest, and a case in point comes from reader Paul Foster this week. He advises that all owners of new racehorses get to name their steed, often by seeking inspiration from their parents’ names.

“So this fella has a horse by Benfica out of Loose ‘n’ Lovely. He called it Andiamo Fica, which is Italian for Let’s Go C—.”

For this effort, he’s just been disqualified from owning horses for 18 months.

My thoughts . . .

1. It’s great to get one over the authorities.

2. Don’t Racing NSW have Google?

Knock it off

TFF had a rant mid-week on the ludicrousness of SCG Trust Chair Tony Shepherd following Alan Jones’ lead by asserting that if the Sydney Football Stadium is knocked down, we risk a Hillsborough disaster – where 96 lives were lost – in Sydney.

My central point was this: “If you do insist that the SFS actually risks being a Hillsborough, how on earth did you or the government let last Saturday night’s final go ahead? You dinkum thought there was a risk of 100 people dying, and somehow – ignoring your duty of care, to preserve the safety of spectators – the match was allowed to proceed?”

Precisely what happened that terrible day at Hillsborough thirty years ago remains a deeply sensitive topic but, as several readers pointed out, it’s a whole lot more complex than just assigning blame to the design of the stadium itself. Just two weeks ago, the man who was in control of police operations that day, former South Yorkshire Police chief superintendent David Duckenfield pleaded not guilty to manslaughter by gross negligence. The date for his trial is set for January. We will let their legal system get on with it.

What They Said

Mick Malthouse at a Ballarat sports lunch on Thursday, on women’s football: “I don’t like it . . . I don’t say you shouldn’t play it, I say I don’t like it . . . I don’t like the women’s game the way it is. I would rather see them with a smaller ball, I would rather see it without any tackling, I would rather see it without any heavy bumping.”

AFLW player Moana Hope on Malthouse’s comments: “He said that AFL was a man’s game and not a woman’s game and he’s said that on stage in front of 50 kids who had just played a boys and girls game of football. I left after that. I was so disgusted and drove back to Melbourne. He can have an opinion but then there’s just degrading and disrespectful comments. We’re in 2018, not in 1942 . . . I will never be in the same room as him again.”

Drought over: Tiger Woods celebrates with caddie Joe LaCava after the Tour Championship golf tournament and the FedEx Cup final at Eastlake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia.

Photo: EPA

Tiger Woods on his 80th tour win: “I was having a hard time not crying on the last hole. I just can’t believe I pulled this off. It hasn’t been so easy the last couple of years. It’s hard to believe I was able to do it again . . . [lightly sobs]”

Cooper Cronk on whether he’ll be 100% for this weekend’s grand final: “Obviously there’s a point where you can’t get things right in a certain amount of time . . . at some stage God or science will say no, but until then I’ll do everything I possibly can.”

Shane Watson on the support for Steve Smith: “To be able to see so many people come along to a grade game is incredible. We see the crowds that come along to a Sheffield Shield game or a JLT Cup as well, it’s nothing compared to this. It’s very impressive.”

New Zealand great Brendon McCullum tweets his view that David Warner celebrated a grade century a bit too much: “Geez Davey! This celebration is the equivalent of Sir Ed Hillary giving it large climbing his front steps, post Everest! Hahaha.”

Over the top: Dave Warner was in a particularly devastating mood against St George during his knock of 155 not out.

Photo: AAP

Richmond young gun Jack Higgins on winning goal of the year: “Firstly, my heart is at about a thousand minutes per second, so if I screw it up, don’t hate on me.”

Wallaby Ned Hanigan with a fine mixed metaphor: “We can’t be sitting there kicking stones and letting it just get worse, we’ve got to grab it by the balls and try and turn it around.”

Melbourne Storm’s Will Chambers knows how the media rolls: “It’s pretty easy to be a keyboard warrior, people don’t really say stuff to your face. It’s easy to print it in a newspaper, but they won’t come and say it to you. But everyone wants a story, it’s pretty funny don’t you think? I’m from a small town in the Northern Territory. You don’t get much media up there, it’s pretty cruisy, it’s not the Sydney press.”

Michael Cheika aware of how quickly things can change: “They wanted to cut Nathan Buckley’s head off last year didn’t they, and he’s in a grand final this week. That’s the way it goes.”

Richmond coach Damien Hardwick after their elimination: “It was an un-Richmond-like performance.”

Jose Mourinho can’t explain why Manchester United players can’t fire up: “I can’t explain the difference of attitude because I never had a difference of attitude. For me it is difficult to explain that.”

Team of the Week

Magpies/Eagles, Roosters/Storm. Play in this weekend’s grand finals.

Tiger Woods. After his extraordinary finish to the season – including his first victory in five years – his world ranking has soared to 13, a nice improvement from where he finished in 2017, at 1193.

Central Coast Heart. This regional elite team just won the Netball NSW Premier League grand final last night, a big achievement for the only non-metropolitan team in the Premier League competition.

Tom Mitchell. As TFF predicted, winner of the 2018 Brownlow medal.

Nathan Buckley. One of the most storied figures in Australian sport is about to add the one thing his glittering career has lacked – a premiership. After his Collingwood side finished 13th last year, they are today in the grand final against the Eagles.

Eddie McGuire. There is a very good reason they don’t call him “Eddie the Eagle”. The Collingwood president is a Magpie to the marrow of his bones, and his decision not to sack Buckley last year now looks a like a master-stroke.

Mozzie Legends. Beat the young pups of the Weigall Wanderers in the Cook and Philip Park indoor soccer grand final. The significance is that the Mozzies have played in every single season held since this ex-Olympic venue was handed over to the public in 2001 – meaning that the team, who now has an average age of 45, have compensated their loss of speed with an injection of guile and determination.

Peter FitzSimons is a Herald journalist, columnist and author, based in Sydney. He is also a former Wallabies player.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/sport/slater-case-proves-nrl-justice-is-indeed-blind-and-just-plain-stupid-20180928-p506nm.html

1 note · View note

topicprinter · 7 years

Link

Hi, my name is Dave and I'm the CoFounder of Blogger Outreach software NinjaOutreach.com.Last year I published a post here on Reddit entitled:In September 2014 We Set A Goal To Build A $20k/month SaaS Business In 1 Year – Here’s What HappenedYou can read that here:While I recommend anyone interested in our story to read that post to get the proper background on the start of the company, I’ll highlight the TL;DR as it’s written there:January 14: We launch the business several months later than we expected after 2.5 months in beta and a few hundred people trying it out.January – July: We make a ton of mistakes and the business “grows” to around $3k mrrAugust – December: We make more mistakes, but we do a lot of things right, and end the year over $10k mrr, short of our original stretch goal, but in line with our “first” goal which was $10k mrr, (although not in 365 days from the original statement, but within 365 days from launch).And at the end of that very long post, there is a small line that is easy to overlook. It readsOur goal for 2016 is $30k and 1k customers!So here I am ready to report on our progress, and again I’ll start with another TL;DR:We did it.Here’s our REVENUE statement from the last few months plus the Year To Date. The profit statement is not very impressive because we invest everything back into the business such as new hires, etc—but it is positive. Customers actually turned out less than 1k, but because we increased prices we hit our goal anyway.Click to view screenshot hereIf that piques your interest, here is a bit more about what actually happened.January - MarchTo summarize these three months, the business didn’t really grow much at all. Actually, it flatlined around $10k and was like that for most of December through March.In fact, in one month we actually went BACKWARDS in MRR, which, for a subscription business, is a big no-no.It’s important to look back at a time like this when we’ve actually hit our goal and remember that things didn’t always look this good. The year actually started off terribly and I was legitimately thinking that this might be it i.e. that the business wouldn’t grow anymore.Frankly, we were running out of ideas.Given what I know now, there are some pretty important lessons here, those being:You can finish strong even with a slow start. Don’t lose hope until you really have tried everything.April - MaySo, how did we get out of it?The biggest thing we pulled out of nowhere during this time was “acquiring” my personal blog.I had been running a personal blog on marketing and business for about two years called SelfMadeBusinessman. While it never lived up to my expectations, I had definitely worked hard on it and it had a decent amount of traffic and quality white hat links.Unfortunately, on account of the fact that I was actually running a business as opposed to just blogging about business, I no longer had much time to keep up with the blog. Eventually, I stopped writing on it altogether and it was just sitting there collecting dust.Right around this time, I read a post from Matthew Barby about acquiring websites for traffic and it sparked an idea to transfer all my site’s content to NinjaOutreach and do a full redirect.Mind you, this was not an easy decision. Although it wasn’t making any money, I believe based on the traffic alone I could have sold it on a market like Flippa for at least mid-four figures. Additionally, SelfMadeBusinessman represented my personal brand and was a source of networking and forming contacts. And of course, I figured one day I would go back to it, and I’d be better off not having to start from scratch.Still, NinjaOutreach has been my number one priority since the beginning, so we decided to go through with it. NinjaOutreach basically swallowed SelfMadeBusinessman.The traffic boost from this after a month or so was significant. Within two months we had doubled our traffic, and doubling our traffic meant more sign ups and gave us the fuel to grow again.Here’s what that looked like:Click to view screenshot hereSurprisingly, over the course of last year, we never pulled the trigger to acquire another website.However, that changed just a few days ago when we bought one off of Flippa, which is in the process of being redirected. Whether or not it produces similar results is yet to be seen, but it’s definitely one of our goals this year to find and acquire a few websites. If you have one you’d like to sell, hit me up!We also launched massive link building campaigns throughout the year using our prospecting and outreach tool.One of our earlier campaigns involved broken link building work where we leveraged thousands of bad-for-SEO dead URLS leading to the now defunct company, Topsy. Long story short, we contacted bloggers who linked to Topsy in their posts and suggested our tool as an alternative where we provide the content and they link back to us instead.This campaign alone drove hundreds of backlinks to our site in a span of a few months.We also launched a competitor link building campaign where we contacted bloggers who’ve included some of our competitors in their posts. We reached out and asked if they were interested in also adding NinjaOutreach to their articles or resources.This campaign received a pretty high response rate (72%) and generated close to 150 unique inbound links for our site.Overall, it helped us gain higher Domain Authority and ranking, taking our site from DA 30+ to DA 50.June - JulyDoubling our traffic in such a short time was huge, no doubt about it, but at the end of the day all it really does is move the ceiling higher, but it doesn't remove it altogether. Basically, we had bought ourselves time, but we needed to find new ways to keep up the momentum.Two major things happened in June / July that helped us do that.The first was a promotion / partnership with Warrior Forum where they sold our product for relatively cheap. We had done something similar with AppSumo the year prior and it was a huge success. Now we wanted to try a new audience.While the launch from Warrior Forum didn’t quite deliver the kind of revenue we were hoping for, it was the highest grossing month we had all year and gave us new traffic, links, and exposure. While we aren’t looking to do something similar in the near future, it’s definitely something I recommend for a new, small business.The next step was upping our prices.We had upped our prices a year before in August and experienced a lot of growth from that.Firstly, there is generally an uptick in sign-ups as people want to be grandfathered in to the old prices.Secondly, the new sign ups are worth more after the change, and although the number of sign-ups might go down slightly, in our experience, the added value from the customer far outweighs it.This is something I have heard from a lot of other business owners and it’s why the general advice is to make sure you continue to increase your prices as you add value to the product.To give you some context on the increase, when NinjaOutreach first launched, our prices ranged from $19 - $149. Now they range from $49 - $599 and we have people on all plans.As a side note, it really does feel a lot better having fewer customers but of higher value. It helps keep customer support more manageable and allows us to be more personal in our approach.For example, we’ve always invited people to have free consultation calls with us, but when people are only paying you $19, it feels like you’re selling your time for peanuts.August - DecemberBelieve it or not, there weren’t any major tricks pulled out in the most recent months that I would describe as “game-changing”.At the end of the day, it’s mostly just math. If you have the sign ups, the conversion rate, and the customer value in the right alignment, you’re going to grow. Not forever, of course, but for us to hit our goal, it was enough.Although there are a few things I thought we did well.We also continued to improve the product and the traffic during that time, but mostly through the same ways we always have, i.e content marketing and influencer marketing. One new channel we added was retargeting, which has definitely helped us be more efficient with turning our traffic into signups.Most notably, during this last half of the year, we’ve been able to bring on 5 new employees, which has helped tremendously with a number of things we’ve been able to get done. Though, I should also mention we had to let go over 2 other ones, which is never enjoyable.Currently, we’re up to 14 people including the 2 active co-founders.Our Next GoalFrom here, we want to get to 1M in Annual Recurring Revenue, which is more than double where we currently are at—so we have a long way to go.But, since it pays to be ambitious, we’re going to try to do it by the end of the year, mainly by sticking with the team we have and putting the right processes into place. Some other revenue streams we’re excited about are building out our services.For example, we just launched The Ninja Academy, which is a 12-module course on how to grow a business via Inbound Marketing. You can learn more about it here:We also have our Done For You link building services, where we leverage our network of bloggers to get you featured. More on that here:If we properly market all of these and continue to grow the subscriptions, I think we can have a great year.Happy to answer any questions the community has!

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

0 notes