America's Next Top Blogger

It’s been a summer of polls, voting and random compilation posts. So it’s not surprising that I’m here to promote another one of those right now.

In the summer of 2010, I started the blog etrain11.blogspot.com and officially entered the game. Over that time period, we’ve amassed over 1 million views across a variety of platforms and now the blogsphere stretches across multiple platforms and writers. But 7 years later, we start the search to take things up another notch. I present to you: America’s Next Top Blogger.

Here’s how it works: if you love writing you should do this. OK, post done.

Fine, I’ll elaborate a little more. America’s Next Top Blogger is a writing competition to determine the best writer we can find using our limited resources of readership. The participants will create a post (or maybe posts if we determine multiple rounds are necessary) and share them here on the blog for our audience to read. Then, we have fan voting to determine some of our favorites. The winner(s) will be offered a top spot on the totem pole here at the blog as an author.

A couple rules real quick. Anybody can participate. I mean literally anybody. Grandmas out there, feel free to enter this. All you need is the following:

1.       A name or code name (doesn’t have to be as dope as etrain so don’t worry) by which we can identify you

2.       A passion for something (doesn’t have to be running or track related, could be anything)

3.       An email or twitter or some way of getting the posts from your possession to ours so we can share them on the site (maybe a comment with a google drive link would work?). As usual, we will make every effort to honor anonymity.

And that’s it! So it’s pretty simple.

I ask that anybody who plans to participate let me know by June 29^th at 10 PM (AKA after the Oscars) just so I know that we have participants and this thing can actually happen. Once I have numbers, we can plan out some type of schedule or strategy to make this work. You can let me know through the usual means: comment on the blog, hit us up on twitter (@TheRealTrain11) or send an email to jarrettfelix1130@gmail.com.

Once you do that, it’s time to start working on your first post! You can write about literally anything you want, but I do have some ideas for you in case you want some.

- XC Team/Individual Rankings for the upcoming season

- State recaps for track or top returners for next year

- Talk about an aspect of track that is under covered here on the site such as field events, sprints, female events, fashion, shoes, cross training, etc.

- Post about the USA Track Championships (recap) or the upcoming world championships in London (preview)

- A cool story or experience from this past season in track. Maybe it’s nonfiction similar to the etrain11 series or maybe it’s fiction like The Running Diaries. Heck, feel free to even write a “chapter” in TRD if you really want to.

- Basketball seems to get hype here if you want to talk about that. Other professional sports talk from Philly or Pittsburgh would probably get some love as well.

I will review all posts before they go up, but as long as they are appropriate they will make it onto the site regardless of subject matter. If you want to reach out to me for advice, suggestions, peer reading, or anything else you can feel free to do that. Some advice I’d offer:

- Be creative and be inventive. Don’t be afraid to have fun with it.

- Don’t feel boxed in by the constraints of a typical blog post. If we can get pictures, audio, etc. into the post then we will do it.

- Use the resources you have around you, gets friends involved, bounce ideas off people, whatever helps get the juices flowing

Last thing, the top 3 posts from last year’s Etrain Oscars were as follows:

#3 Interviews by the Etrain Staff

#2 Bold Predictions for 2016 by Etrain11

#1 The XC All Decade Team by Jarrett Felix

What do they all have in common? Not as much as you think, honestly. Bold Predictions is mostly just jokes and silliness. The XC All Decade Team is a fact and research extravaganza mixed with rankings. The interviews were a cool idea to get a real, first-hand knowledge that isn’t always valuable and hear about interesting experiences and stories.

So yeah, that’s that. Spread this around. Tell your friends and family. And, most importantly, participate! No harm in joining and you might like it! All voting results will be private (besides the winners of course) so you can’t get embarrassed (plus if you are anonymous, no one would even know it is you) and I think it could be a lot of fun.

Any questions or comments, hit us up.

Stay summer classy,

Train