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Lessons from our Guest Bogging contest, How it will work?

Lessons from our Guest Bogging contest, How it will work?

by on March 31, 2010 · 21 comments

Hey everybody, it has been a very hot month on our Guest Blogging Contest, I had too much fun working with all participants of our contest, I had so many new friends, we have showed the blogosphere a great competition with a very high spirit and perfect use of social media specially Twitter, so let’s talk a little about the contest to clear some important things and see how our Guest Blogging Contest is going to work.

For those who participated and other bloggers who enjoyed the good read and added great value to the conversation that still running in the comment section of our blog, I would like to say that I wish to extend my relationship with all my new friends, of course it’s not going to be just a contest relationship :) so keep in touch… Let’s keep the high spirit up and make the best use of social media in our blogging community.

Special Thanks

For our our Media Partner MyBlogGuest.com, and Ann for the great work, with out this cooperation we couldn’t reach this point on the Guest Blogging Contest!

Plz, read the full post, each part is very important as it will explain to you what we are going to do to make everybody happy with us as much as we can.

Lessons from Guest Blogging Contest

I have personally learned lots from being in the middle of the Guest Blogging Contest event, and I am pretty sure that this Guest Blogging Contest has added something to each one of us, it has showed me that beauty of cooperating between bloggers, and here a few points I have learned from it, and would like to share with you:

  • Bloggers must unite to achieve their goals.
  • Promoting others is one way of self promotion
  • Hard work really pays off
  • We are all winners

How many posts we have received

We have received 20+ posts, not all of them are published yet! (probably these links will be updated latter)

  • How to Put the Kibosh on Content Scrapers & Thieves? by Gerald Weber of Houston SEO blog
  • 7 Basic Tips For Designing Your Blog by Nile Flores of Blondish.net
  • How To Get More Twitter Followers by Adriana of How to Write a Marketing Plan
  • Protect Your Content and Reputation by Kristi of the Art of Blogging
  • To Schedule tweets or NOT to tweet? by Kiesha of Blog Tips and Tricks
  • 5 Powerful Ways to Write Dynamic Content by Ralph of Potential to Success
  • 5 Link Building Tips to SkyRocket Search Engine Rankings by Onibalusi of Online Success
  • 43 Blogger Tips – What you should do after installing WordPress by Andrew of Blogging Guide
  • On-Page SEO Tips to Help Drive Organic Traffic to Your Site by James of Evolutionary Designs
  • So You Want To Be A Blog Rockstar? by Nile of WordPress Addict
  • 10 Ways to make your Website more User Friendly by Zack of Online Marketing Mashup
  • Marketing Tips For Capturing & keeping Potential Clients by Clara of Wise Woman
  • Write a Post So Funny and Make People Wet Their Pants by Alisa of Project Happily Ever After
  • How to build a High Quality Following on Twitter by Gautam of Blog Tips and Social Media
  • Classical Conditioning for Blog Subscribers by James Pruitt of Internet Marketing Relationships
  • 3 Must Have Basic Elements for more User-Friendly Blog by CJ Spurr of Writing and design firm
  • 5 Symptoms of Blog Failure by Chris Guthrie of Make Money on the Internet
  • Blog SEO Tactics You Must Not Ignore by Chadrack Irobogo of Home business marketing blog
  • To Buzz or Not To Buzz? That My Friends, Is A Great Question by Ileane of Ms. Ileane Speaks
  • What are the Elements of Successful Bloggers? by Onibalusi of Online Success
  • How many comments we got this month?

    Our blog visitors have added 1.800 + comments this month during running our Guest Blogging Contest, and again I want to say that “Thank you” and “I like your post” kind of comments will not be counted as it has no value to the post.

    I have submitted my post late, do I have a chance?!

    There is a few posts are not published yet regarding time issues, I was trying to avoid weekends and publish one post each day to give a chance for maximum promotion and receiving comments. So, if you have submitted your post today, that means we still can publish it, but tomorrow is the end of our contest, we will stop receiving posts at the 31 of March 2010

    We are going to give one more week to those who was late, and also for myself to do some contacts and prepare the evaluation of posts, I think we don’t have to rush to make everything perfect as possible, don’t you agree with me?

    So, let’s say you have till the day 7 of April 2010 which is fare enough, (remember you was late to submit your post!) after the day 7 of April we will start our evaluation and probably pronouncing the winner after the day 15 of April 2010, I hope this is fine with you! We just want to organize our work, and try to satisfy everybody as much as we can! (give me advice if you have something to say about this in the comments or contact me, I will be glad to hear from you)

    Have you posted about the contest?

    First of all, and this is the most important thing, if you didn’t post about the contest yet then plz do it or you will be out of the contest automatically as you didn’t follow the Guest Blogging Contest guidelines, and all participants have to publish a post talking about the contest and add all links to sponsors, so plz, don’t forget to that it, this is how it works!

    Try to be creative while writing about the contest, give your impressions, add your opinion, talk about how this contest changed your way of thinking about blogging, tell what you like about it/ what you don’t like, be natural, and don’t copy and past, don’t pretend you don’t know how to blog :)

    Take a look to our sponsors once again

    What if I posted about the contest already!

    This is great, you have done it!

    But, do you remember how we started the contest? We started by giving a way $248 worth prizes, and we have got more then the doubled the prizes thanks to our sponsors, we have raised $712.75 for our five winners!

    So, I need one more very simple but very important thing to ask you, plz edit your post, check who is missing on your sponsors links and add it, it will not take a minute!

    How we will divide/split prizes?

    If you notice, we didn’t talk about this at all before, I left this to the end to give myself a chance to think about the best way to do it, specially because I was expecting more sponsors, so I will not have to bother myself by changing the way each time I got a new sponsor, and as you know our prizes started at $248 and reached $712.75 between cash and other services, themes, report, e-books… etc.

    Most of the prizes we have received from our sponsors is enough for our 5 winners, it’s like 5 of everything, the only one difference is on CrazyEgg memberships, which we have 2 memberships only, so we are going to give them to the first and second place winners, but I am going to give a try to get to make all the five winner try CrazyEgg and get a membership for one month for free, hopefully this can work, so (it’s not a promise), just let me see what I can do about it and get back to you.

    So, I think we understand this part as it seems to be very simple, but…

    How we will divide the CASH prizes?! (PLZ Vote)

    I am still thinking about this as well, we have $255 cash via PayPal, for our Guest Blogging Contest winners. The good thing about money is that we can divide it by any number, but I don’t really know what’s the best way to divide or to split the amount between the winners, we are going to have 5 winners, so I have decided to create a simple poll for you to help me on deciding which the best way to go, so plz vote on the poll on the sidebar and help me out with this hard decision!

    The poll is going to be active till the day 15 of April, everyone can vote only once, I am so thankful if I can get a vote from you.

    How we will collect points?

    OK! this is the most hard part, so… again, we will collect points by:

    • Value of content, to do this I will get help of three or more of my friends bloggers who are not a part of it, they haven’t participated in the contest, I believe they have experience enough to evaluate the content of the posts by giving points of 10 (for example) so the final decision is going to be an average depending on multiple opinions, and it’s not going to be personal! So I will take my self out of this not to affect the results, and to make it honest.
    • Value of comments, and the level of conversation and interaction between readers and authors, so basically this is not going to be so hard, as we will give a point for each valuable comment (comments with recommendations and tips will get a point) and another point if the author continue conversation by adding explanation, advice, more tips! This means the number of comments doesn’t mean anything unless it has value.
    • Tweets count, by looking on the number of tweets each post got we will be counted as a point, and probably this can change the results upside down, so if you wrote the best content ever and you didn’t promote then this can effect your points, remember that this is a (writing/popularity) contest!
    • If two posts got the same points, we will look into some other extra factors like how many visits generated by your post for example.
    • Also there are a few participants submitted more than one post to the contest, I thought this is not a bad idea so I opened the door for submitting more than one post, anyways… it won’t hurt anyone, so… we will take the best post that has the best results, so don’t worry about that.

    I am so sorry that the post is too long, but it’s important event, and I had to explain so many thing!

    Looking forward to hear your opinions and thoughts

    Plz, don’t forget to vote on the poll, it’s on the sidebar, help me out with this hard decision!

    Article by Hesham Zebida

    I create websites, and I develop Thesis Skins. I am a social network lover. I am also the night creature who works hard to keep this project up. Owner and founder of FamousBloggers.net.

    Write for us a guest post

    { 18 comments… read them below or add one }

    Latief from AnotherBlogger
    Twitter:
    April 6, 2010 at 3:27 am

    This contest run very well since the last contest, this time we have so many participant, love it!
    .-= Latief@AnotherBlogger´s last blog ..Another Blogger Have Page Rank 3!! =-.

    Reply

    Hesham May 26, 2010 at 10:33 am

    Wait till you see the coming one ;)

    Reply

    Ileane
    Twitter:
    April 1, 2010 at 11:24 am

    Oh wow, I almost forget an important feature about the contest. Can’t talk now, gotta go write a post!!
    .-= Ileane´s last blog ..Tribute to PBS Programming =-.

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 2:11 pm

    Well done ;)

    Reply

    Ileane from Blogging
    Twitter:
    April 1, 2010 at 4:09 pm

    Hesham, please take a look and let me know if anything is missing. I wont to make sure I meet all of the requirements.

    This contest is one of the best ever!

    Thanks.
    .-= Ileane@Blogging´s last blog ..Guest Posting Contest – Will I Be A Winner? =-.

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 4:22 pm

    Perfect ;)

    Reply

    Chadrack from Home Business Marketing
    Twitter:
    April 1, 2010 at 10:25 am

    I must agree that it has been fun. This is my first time of guest blogging. I really did not entered it for the prize. My time here has really been worthwhile. For keeping the friendship going, I’ve already decided to continue as a guest blogger here in the months, and probably years to come. I truly love your idea of cooperation instead of competition.

    On updating the post about the contest, will do that right away!
    .-= Chadrack@Home Business Marketing´s last blog ..Our Top Commentator For March – Link Reward! =-.

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 2:13 pm

    Thanks Chadrack, and you are always welcome to guest post here at any time.. good luck with your work buddy!

    Reply

    Onibalusi Bamidele April 1, 2010 at 10:06 am

    This is great! I will update my website with the new sponsors as soon as I have time.
    Thanks a lot, this is really a great contest.
    .-= Onibalusi Bamidele´s last blog ..Interview with Benjamin Lang of ben-lang.com =-.

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 10:14 am

    Hey Onibalusi, thank you buddy, I wish you good luck ;)

    Reply

    Andrew from Blogging Guide
    Twitter:
    April 1, 2010 at 5:17 am

    Hesham,

    It has been great fun (and many of us have received some excellent exposure – so thanks).

    I’ve updated my blog post with the new sponsors.

    Andrew
    .-= Andrew @ Blogging Guide´s last blog ..Blogging Guide: The Pages Google Expect To See =-.

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 10:13 am

    Thank you Andrew, exposure was great and we have meet with nice bloggers.

    Thank you again for updating the post, much appreciated your fast respond

    Reply

    Gerald Weber April 1, 2010 at 12:09 am

    Hesham,

    Sounds good. It should be interesting to see how everything turns out. I’ll be sure and update the sponsors on my blog post tomorrow morning. :-)

    Reply

    Hesham April 1, 2010 at 12:13 am

    Thank you Gerald for your great support, you have added a special taste to our blogging and social networking ;)

    Reply

    Patrick Toerner from Young Entrepreneur March 31, 2010 at 10:20 pm

    I wish I had gotten into this contest. I hope you guys decide to hold another one in a few months!
    .-= Patrick Toerner @Young Entrepreneur´s last blog ..10 More Wordpress Plugins I Can’t Live Without =-.

    Reply

    Hesham March 31, 2010 at 10:26 pm

    It was really .. really fun, I can not wait few months to hold another contest!

    The thing is we can’t do the same contest exactly each time, so we have to develop our ideas, do a better contest and find more sponsors to help on that!

    Reply

    Patrick Toerner from Young Entrepreneur March 31, 2010 at 10:31 pm

    That sounds great! There is always room for improvement. It’s pretty funny, I am getting excited about the next contest, and this one isn’t even over.

    So far, the contest has been great in my eyes. I learned a lot and was exposed to blogs I might never have seen otherwise.
    .-= Patrick Toerner @Young Entrepreneur´s last blog ..$1,000 a Month From a Minisite =-.

    Reply

    Hesham March 31, 2010 at 11:01 pm

    You know Patrick, I really never had a big problem with ideas since more than 2 years of blogging, the problem is time, and this contest is the best thing I ever done on this blog till now for real, so I hope the coming days will be good enough till we reach day of pronouncing winners!

    Ah! I hope the next contest we can jump to the 3 figures cash prizes.. so it’s going to be more hot.. awesome!

    I hope PayPals of our sponsors will not be empty on that time lol

    Ah, by the way, don’t forget to vote on the poll, on the sidebar plz

    Reply

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