Interview with : Hugo Guzman, Editor in chief of RealFootball365.com

 

Interview by : Stefan Tesoriero, CEO of Sportsmemorabilia.com

 

 

Stefan: So first off, I want to thank you for taking the time out to speak with me.

 

Hugo : Oh, no problem at all.

 

Stefan :  Secondly, I love your layout. I would just like to compliment you on your site. It is packed visually. It is stunning and just really, really clean and really top notch.

 

Hugo : I really appreciate that. 

 

Stefan : Are you part of the network? Because I see that others and all the other team sites seem to have the same look and feel.

 

Hugo : They are actually all our sites. We actually manage all of them.

 

Stefan : Excellent.  Really, I guess invariably we could do one of these for each of them but will talk broad strokes here. 

 

Hugo : okay

 

Stefan : I would love to just get some background questions which I believe I sent to you. How and when did you get into the site, the fan site and the blogs. Let’s start with the Miami.

 

Hugo : I got into the business a few years back year 2003 or so. I worked for CBS Sportsline for sometime which is based here in South Florida. We launched Miami Football 365 basically just a pet project between me and some friends, some local friends here, you know who are big fans of the Dolphins and the Hurricanes. But we quickly realized that the site was getting quite a following and we realized that we could, you know, create a kind of a commercial venture so we went ahead back in the very end of 2004.  We started to do developing of Real Football 365 which was basically a site that goes to cover all of division 1 college football and NFL and the other teams. And we officially incorporated in about midway 2005, but Real Football has been in existence now for about two years or so. Okay, as far as my background I guess, my real background in terms of marketing or you know, online marketing with Search Engine Optimization. Things of that nature which basically means driving traffic through organic means, through like people searching for some search engines and things of that nature or so. One of the interesting aspects about our sites up to this point is we don’t advertise. We do not spend any money advertising, you know in the traditional sense. All the traffic is through word of mouth or public relations efforts or people reading our stories when they are syndicated on other football sites or something like that. 

 

Stefan : Okay, and I guess that speaks to the Miami sites specifically and network wide. How many visitors do you get daily or annual basis?

 

Hugo: Well, at this point the Miami site really now just became another satellite to the main sites so we don’t necessarily treat them as separate entities, in other words, Miami Football is really just the same thing as going to the Dolphins’ Team base, you know within real football, there is no real distinction, they’re just now one of the many teams. As a network, the sites typically generate between, I want to say that it attracts anywhere from ten to twenty thousand unique visitors a day, or in that range which is not a huge number when you consider the some of larger national portals.  But it is fairly solid considering that the site has only been in existence for a couple of years and then I want to say the readership, in other words, like the number of visitors that come to the site on a monthly basis has got to be in the hundreds of thousands. So they’re fairly fanatical. In other words, a good number of chronics or regulars that will post on the forum, post comments via an article and what not.

 

Stefan : Sure. I completely understand the power of these sites. I am a huge fan and I have been reading metsblog.com for years and I am one of those guys that it is part of my ten in the morning.

 

Hugo : Right. You are saying the ten sites you just check up on in the morning and stuff like that and I understand how powerful it could be.

 

Stefan:  I want to conduct this interview, to get some information and put it up there on our site in order to kinda act as a resource for Miami Dolphins fans and help our site become more than just retail, and get into a fan’s top ten.  I mean, we get tons of interest and orders for Dan Marino autographed jerseys, Dan Marino autographed footballs, but we want people to get unique content on the Dolphins as well.

 

Hugo : wow!

 

Stefan : Yeah. And it is funny because you know, it is not that people calling for anything limited edition or anything like that, they just want Dan Marino’s stuff.

 

Hugo : Right! And Ronnie Brown, Ronnie Brown star power may get up there but I guess  lack of a sustainable quarterback has kind of hurt him. I was just here in an office this afternoon of a colleague of mine he has got a Dan Marino signed photograph in his office and in fact it is not a Dolphins picture.  

 

Stefan : Actually there is also a lot of the undefeated season memorabilia. There is still that, their fans are definitely die hard.

 

Hugo : Oh yeah. It is not easy being a fan of the Dolphins

 

Stefan : [laughs]

 

Hugo : It has been going on for years, so... 

 

Stefan : Sure, I understand.   It has been a lot of heart break. I definitely understand but in terms of differentiating yourself from let say, others because with every team there is so many resource sites, fan sites. What do you do currently and what are you looking to do in the future to differentiate yourself from kind of the rest of the field?

 

Hugo :  Right! I’ll tell you that we learned quickly or when we first started, we basically do like a game preview or recaps.  You know basically for every team that we covered what we found is just like what you said, there so much proliferation, so many other outlets not even including the major national house and local newspapers online that what we found when we rolled and recapped and preview we read them basically there’s just too many of them, just too many outlets doing that so in other words like when the AP puts a recap of the games first of all, ESPN runs the sports finals and that CNN runs it, the local paper runs it on top of their own recap you know previews or whatever. So by the time the reader gets to what I guess we can call the second tier outlets, you do not want to read another recap as we found out quickly that’s just not something worth doing.   So what we have done and what we will continue to do is we really strive to write opinion columns. All our columns, although they include items or news items, they are all commentary pieces. Thereby, we have a staff of roughly twenty national writers to cover NFL or college and essentially, even if they focus on specific player or specific team the articles are op-ed in nature so you know we really strive to come up with unique angles and unique pieces and humorous pieces, things that are off the beaten path. Another way to put it is often times you have certain stories for certain teams that kind of how the players look that week if you will, like for example, last week everybody just talked about Cleo Lemon and Joey Harrington and just you know, using the Dolphins as an example. So what we try to do is just not a cover that angle. In other words, we might just mention it an article or two for the week or what we try to do is bring out other facets of up coming matches or you know the past week’s game or just something in general. Like for example, I did a piece last week on comparing Ronnie Brown and the rest of the draft class on how they have done up to this point for it has only been two years but the comments and insights like the fact that I love the top ten picks of 2004 drafts. None of them have really become game changing players. 

 

Hugo : Right now I took my time, I cannot remember the name. Actually funny, oh my goodness, I was just talking about him to somebody a few minutes ago, you know who I am talking about . It is so funny—

 

Stefan : I can’t, I can’t even remember so don’t - -

 

Hugo : Crazy, literally talking about him but it will come back to me. We try to do things that are very unique. Last week, we had one of our senior writers, a gentleman named Os Davis extremely humorous, very funny guy, and he did a piece called The Twelve Days of Christmas at Real Football 365. Basically, he just rolled out like a version of the song, you know, on the 12 days of Christmas, you know, on the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, and it is really funny but it is also topical. It is basically, it deals with the things that are going on in the NFL today and it is just a great piece, really funny. So that is all we try to do. We try and separate ourselves by doing original work, things that analyze the game that are very insightful in terms of that are just off the beaten path. Because what we found was we get the best response from daily basis on our goals are just original on scope. In other words, if someone were to look up or search for Miami Dolphins articles or Detroit Lion articles, most of them will be on more or less on the same exact topic by oh whatever, you know, Joey Harrington, etc.

 

Stefan : Exactly

 

Hugo : And then all of the sudden, we will have an article about Nick Saben’s pension for this or that or other generic strategies at this point but that is the idea. The idea is really to set trends as far as the topics are concerned, the angles that we cover. We reject articles that are too generic in nature, they’re too much of an all reveal, or they have too much of a preview or recap feel to them

 

Stefan : Sure. Because that’s just mass produced.

 

Hugo : And even for the future that is what we really strive to do, basically improve the quality of our work and also you know, the skill of our work. Other than that the only other thing that we really strive for as far as monetizing the site for advertising is to develop our fantasy product. We are in the works or in the process of building up our own fantasy and pick and style games.

 

Stefan: Sure and how big is it? It is interesting that you brought up the fantasy. It is something I am gonna ask next. It seems like with every year that goes by, fantasy games in general continue to grow but specifically, I think by far, it is a perfect set-up. It is a once a week activity. Unlike baseball where you may have to dedicate yourself on a nightly basis to swap and pitch ball etc. Baseball is demanding.

 

Hugo :  Yeah, and basketball too. Well, back in the days where baseballs basically picking your team and then accumulating stats and seeing who is like the best team so to speak but fantasy for baseball is very difficult because of that reasoning which is that it has cornered way too much attention and most people they can’t, in other words, in order to be a good fantasy baseball player, you have to really spend quite a bit of time on it

 

Stefan : Yeah, and it is almost. It is so funny because obviously football, the NFL came first and fantasy came later. But it was almost as if the opposite way around. Because the schedule is designed and it is just tons of people talking back and forth. Tons of trash talk for the weekend and tons of trash on Sunday and Monday leading up to it just exploded. So in terms of fantasy, do you feel that a large percentage of the people who utilize the site, utilize it for fantasy ?

 

Hugo : It is funny that you mentioned that. Well, yes, what ends up happening is we try and cover fantasy, we do not cover as much as we would like to that is not our arena that we would really like to delve into more as far as daily coverage. But we found is that exactly that even when we write articles that are not specifically focused on fantasy, we still get for example like comments on the article relating to some fantasy decision. Or we do a piece of player before a season somehow, you know what I mean , people will, the feedback we get that people are using that to make decision to do what they do for fantasy game. So yeah, I mean I have a feeling it is not just this stuff, I think that essentially, there’s two population out there that kinda feel online or off line sports or media, sports policy and that’s gambling and fantasy. Both of them, people are reading the you know, there was a time when people only read something like specifically regarding lines like you know, betting lines or specifically for fantasy in sites but now seem people are just reading everything they can. You know, like for example, although read their local newspaper to get fantasy, it is good there might be something in that that they did not know. I mean so any story is a fantasy story now.

 

Stefan : Absolutely, and you know, there’s no shock that an there is an obvious connection and correlation between gambling and fantasy sports. Obviously people like the information for strictly gambling but mostly fantasy.

 

Hugo : And you know they are very similar, I mean, there’s definitely a lot of connection there are a lot of correlation on those two facets are really gigantic and they really fuel you know, daily traffic because these people just can’t get enough . One question on there, on your little list basically what inspired me to kinda get started. The reason that we are called the 365 at the end of our name is that back in my day, back in 2001 or 2002 I was already a fairly fanatical fan and I really like the study of things not just for fantasy or gambling but just as a student of the game and what I found is that in the off season, there just wasn’t very much coverage. There was just few sites that would dedicate themselves to covering football on a daily basis.  So I get frustrated, I’d be at work or whatever I was doing and there was just nothing to read about the Dolphins or about anybody, really. Not even the local papers spend much time on for example the Dolphins are not covered the Dolphin on daily basis in the off season unless there is something going on or some sort of transactions. And when there is something, it is usually barely minimal. It would be baseball or basketball or hockey or whatever the case may be. So I used to go and be with fans and there would be paired discussion or daily insights and I started thinking me and my friends can do this. I think that if I could you know, do this for the Dolphins or the Hurricanes and then eventually I realize I could hire professional writers to do this. And that’s what we have been doing. So that is really the insider thing was that chances of finding or not having a resource for year round coverage, daily coverage that is what we kind of dedicate ourselves into. 

 

Hugo : It is still we’re so young and we’re so new that we are still building like one of our goals is to really if not to cover everything on a daily basis then at least to syndicate contents on a daily basis so we can truly cover all the teams on it. It is not just a mental task. I mean it is a very consuming task because it so unbelievable how many teams there are. It is very difficult to line up coverage but we try to do, you know at least weekly or monthly for each team. The NFL you know we can do it fairly easily but we can’t do it. College is - -  I mean people it is so funny because we can write about let’s say, I don’t know, some smaller team, maybe it is not about the team in general or about a player that maybe did something against a certain team like New Mexico state. It is not exactly the most high profile team but I mean if some, if one of my authors write something that is even slightly off, I mean it can be like the smallest thing about why a guy did this or that. But the writer may get it wrong or does not point something out, boom, we start to get fans from that team “Ah, excuse me, but you know, that’s not what happened—“ And it is like wow, and that is why we realized that there is really a market out there for all these teams. I mean it is amazing and I mean they are really out there scouring the internet trying to find content the about their team. It is amazing. It is really something. You know it really goes hand in hand. As we grow, I am sure we will see more of that and getting more feedback about missing points about why some specific players got you know, more carries and what not. It is crazy but it is fun too. It is a great stuff. 

 

Stefan : It is, it’s fantastic. Like I said, you have really done a fantastic job and really I want to go ahead and thank you again for taking the time to speak with me. It has been really enlightening. It is great to see where the inspiration comes from.

 

Hugo : Right, right…

 

Stefan : Fantastic. Thanks for taking the time out. I will definitely speak with you soon. 

 

Hugo : Alright. I really appreciate it very much. You have a good one.