Category: Contests

Okay, the contest is officially over.

Here’s the list of entrants, along with their comment count from the top commentator’s list as of midnight January 31st:

o) Lori (2)
o) Paul (5)
o) Harmony (7)
o) ScottUA (3)
o) Chris Christensen (4)
o) Betshopboy (4)
o) Allen (0)
o) Sulaman (0)
o) Tanyetta (4)
o) Dawn (0)
o) Timmy (0)
o) Majdi (0)
o) Text and Quotes (0)
o) Mr. Carl McKever Jr (0)
o) Aunt Babz (0)
o) Trendy Money (14)

A number of contestants apparently forgot to come back and comment to get into the top commentator’s list. So, unfortunately, they don’t get any entries in the drawing. We’re left with the following people in the running:

o) Lori (2)
o) Paul (5)
o) Harmony (7)
o) ScottUA (3)
o) Chris Christensen (4)
o) Betshopboy (4)
o) Tanyetta (4)
o) Trendy Money (14)

That makes 43 total entries in the drawing. Since I didn’t really want to write out 43 pieces of paper, I went to my favorite online random number generator and generated a random number between 1 and 43. I then counted that many entries in the above list from top to bottom to see who the winner was (that list was ordered by when each person officially entered the contest).

The random number generated was…31. That just missed Tanyetta, and leaves Trendy Money as the winner!

Thanks to everyone for your participation. I’ll be in email contact with the winner to get the information needed to transfer over the website.

The clock is ticking down on my January contest.

For anyone who started reading the blog late, and didn’t catch the announcement, you can read the original contest post here. The short version, though, is that by posting a comment on the original contest post and by being one of the top commentators at the stroke of midnight (EST) on January 31st, 2008, you’ll be eligible to win a free SBI! website.

SBI! is hands down the best way to create a niche website to make money online, especially if you’ve never done so before. The SBI! process leads you through keyword research, picking a domain name, designing the site and writing the pages, generating traffic and building relationships with your visitors. The package includes every tool you might need, including ad tracking and autoresponders.

Paying for all the tools alone separately would amount to more in a year than SBI! charges. And you can get it all for free for the first year.

Any of the top commentators at midnight, January 31st, who have also commented on the original contest post, will be given a number of entries into the contest equal to the number of comments of theirs showing in the top commentators list. I’ll then randomly draw one of the entries from a hat, and that person gets the free SBI! site.

Along with my mentoring on the entire process, of course. By the end of the year, your site should be earning more than enough to cover the SBI! fee for the next year.

Note that it’s perfectly legal to toss a lot of comments into the ring in the last day or so to boost your entry count. Just make sure that each comment adds to the post, and isn’t just a “great post” sort of comment. I will ruthlessly delete any fluff comments that were made just to boost someone’s comment count for contest purposes. Comments on old posts count just as well as comments on the newer posts, too.

Good luck to everyone who has entered!

One of my resolutions this year is to get back to holding regular contests, so I’m going to start the year off with a doozy.

The prize is a free SBI! site for a year. This is a $299 value, and includes the absolute best set of step-by-step instructions for creating a profitable, high quality niche site that I’ve ever seen. You also get free autoresponders and ad trackers for use on your niche site, along with a year’s worth of web hosting for the site and access to SBI!’s Block Builder, a no-HTML way to build websites.

To qualify to win the prize, you must do two things:

1) Leave a comment on this post saying that you’re entering the contest.

2) At the stroke of midnight (EST) on January 31st, 2008, be one of the ten people listed in the top commentators list on Online Opportunity. Note that I have it counting only comments in the last 30 days.

And that’s it. At the end of the contest I’ll hold a random drawing to pick the winner. Every person in the top commentator’s list gets one entry for every comment listed by their name. So if you leave 100 comments over the month, you get 100 entries in the random drawing. But even a person with 1 entry can still win.

Since I anticipate more entries than my normal high-tech paper-in-a-bag technique can handle, I’ll use the month to write a computer program to do the drawing. Or maybe I’ll assign that as an exercise to my students.

This is a great opportunity to test drive SBI! for a full year. At the end of the year, you pick up the $299 yearly fee for subsequent years. If you’re not making enough from your site to cover that, just don’t renew it (although, you’ve probably not followed the action guide if you’re not making at least that by the end of the year).

Good luck to everyone who enters!

P.S. A quick update on my SBI! niche site…after about 30 days it started receiving traffic from targeted keywords in Google. I was a bit surprised, since normally my sites take longer than that to start to rate highly in Google. I checked the traffic stats, and found the site on the first page of Google (typically in the first 3 results) for half a dozen highly targeted long-tail keywords. The site was also on pages 2 and 3 for some higher traffic, shorter keywords.

All this without my doing any promotion, link building, or SEO at all, other than just using the SBI! tools. I’m looking forward to when the site is complete enough to start doing link building and promotion, and seeing the results improve even more.

Well, the long awaited Page Rank update seems to have happened, or be in the process of happening.

I’ve said before that Page Rank isn’t all that important. It’s a visible way of measuring inbound links to your website, and so has been used by advertisers to help set advertising costs for sites. But it’s a minor factor in your search engine results positioning, and really shouldn’t be something you obsess about increasing.

But, as Carolyn mentioned in a previous comment, it’s nice to have something higher than 0. You can see what your page rank is at various data centers by going to DigPageRank.com. For example, it looks like JugglingFrogs.com has a new page rank of 3.

Online Opportunity comes up as a 4 in all the data centers except for a few. Since the previous page rank was 0, I’d say that the new page rank will be 4. This is due in part to the link building campaign I did over the summer, submitting to a large number of directories. I built those links to get the SEO benefit from the links, not to build page rank, but you can’t help but build page rank when you add more inbound links.

Way back when, I’d announced a contest to guess the new page rank. At the time, I thought the next update would be in August. We’re a couple of months late, but a contest is a contest.

Rosa, over at Gaje Master, was the only one with the correct guess. So Rosa wins the prize!

We never did figure out what the prize was, though. If you have any requests, Rosa, let me know. Keep in mind that I’m currently backlogged on doing work on Lori’s blog from the last contest, so anything that requires much work will probably wait a while.

Long-time readers will remember the crazy month of July, where I held a comment contest. The top commentator by the end of it had over one hundred comments for the month, if I remember correctly.

I awarded a custom EzineArticles.com article to the first and second place commentors that month. I wanted to share how those articles turned out.

Carolyn, over at Juggling Frogs, received an article titled, “Make Your Own Doll House At Home Without Frustration — 5 Tips“. That article was placed into the Crafts & Hobbies category of EzineArticles.com.

Apparently that’s a pretty hot category. Out of 292 views so far, 45 people clicked through the links to Carolyn’s blog, for an astounding 15.4% click through rate. I included two links to specific posts about doll house making, and a general link to the top page of her blog. The top page link received no clicks at all, but the specific posts split the 45 clicks evenly. So I’d say there’s a good market for people looking for detailed information on that sort of topic at EzineArticles.com.

Rosa, at GajeMaster.com, asked for an article about blogging tips. So I wrote “Blogging Tips — Five Things Every Blogger Should Know“, and put it into the Blogging category at EzineArticles.com.

That article was viewed 77 times, and received 5 clicks, for a more normal 6.4% click through rate. Interestingly, these people weren’t so interested in the specific posts linked in the article, but more in the top level link to Rosa’s blog.

These results contrast with a typical article on the make money online topic. There, I see high article views, and low to non-existent click through rates.

It’s all about picking a niche that works well for the article directory. Apparently crafts and hobbies is a rich market on EzineArticles.com. I’d say an intensive article marketing campaign, another 15 to 20 articles on related topics, could do wonders for pulling traffic to Juggling Frogs (or related blogs). A similar campaign about blogging tips wouldn’t do as well, but would still bring in some traffic.

So if you’re wondering if article marketing can work for your blog, it’s worth writing a single article and publishing it to EzineArticles.com to test the market. If the article views and click through rate looks promising, you can ramp up to a full campaign.

For more information on article marketing, see my Article Marketing 101 series.

Unfortunately, preparations for my house move came during the end of the September contest, so the deadline was extended for a bit.

I now have my computer partially hooked up at home, so am calling the September contest officially over. The top commentators as of now are:

• Lori (8)
  
• betshopboy (4)
  
• Desty (4)
  
• Enkay Blog (3)
  
• Jerad Kaliher (3)
  
• John Bennett (3)
  
• Juggling Frogs (2)
  
• Adil (2)
  
• Prija (2)
  
• Dealio Dealer (2)
  

Each of these individuals gets one entry into the contest. I utilized my usual high tech “bits of paper” system for the drawing, and thoroughly mixed up the paper in the plastic lid to one of those 100 blank DVD collections.

I then drew the winner, who is…BetShopBoy!

The official prize in the contest is a discount on two years of top notch web hosting at Site5. This prize may be transferred to someone else in another contest, given away, used, or traded in on something else.

BetShopBoy, I’ll contact you via email to see what you’d like to do with it.

Everyone, thank you for entering by commenting during September! Given the amount of unpacking I have to do at the house, I’m going to postpone the next contest until November.

The September contest is approaching its end.

To enter, be listed in the top commentators’ list by the end of September 30th. The winner gets a discount on two years of top quality web hosting through Site5. Or, if they don’t need web hosting, we’ll work something else out that they’ll like.

The bottom of the list is currently held with 2 comments. So make 3 and you’re guaranteed to be on the list in time for the end of the contest.

Unless someone else has the same idea.

With the fall semester still getting into swing, I don’t have the time to manage a contest like August’s or the creativity to come up with a cute angle.

So September is the “No Contest” contest. The winner will be randomly chosen from amongst the people on the top commentators’ list just after midnight (EST), September 30th, 2007. That’s a maximum of ten pieces of paper I need to make up for my high tech contest system.

You don’t have to be at the top of the list, just somewhere in it. Since the two bottom entries in the list right now have 1 comment each, this should be an easy contest to enter. Just leave a comment or two, and the chances are good you’ll be entered.

The prize?

What about a discount on two years of premium quality web hosting at Site 5? Here’s the deal: Site 5 has a terrific web hosting deal where, by paying for two-years in advance, you can get the price down to $5 a month for more space and bandwidth than you’ll ever use.

Since I’m an affiliate of Site 5, if the contest winner buys through my link I get a commission. I’ll forward that commission back to the winner, giving them an effective discount. The exact amount they’ll get back depends on which hosting package they end up choosing.

And if the contest winner doesn’t need web hosting? We’ll work out another prize that’s mutually satisfactory.

The August “Win Me As A Slave” contest results are in!

You can see the number of entries each contestant had at the scoreboard post. I again used the high-tech method of writing entries on pieces of paper and drawing them out of a bucket. Before I do another contest that will have multiple entries per person, I need to write a computer program to automate that part!

I’m pleased to announce that the winner, as drawn randomly from the bucket, was Lori!

Lori gets me as her own slave for a task that requires up to a few hours (all at once, or spread out). From previous comments Lori’s made, I suspect that will mean setting up WordPress for her, complete with my spam-free settings and favorite plugins.

Congratulations Lori, and contact me via email once you’re ready to collect.

Also, Bohemian Bloggers never responded to emails notifying them they won one of the articles from the July contest (the danger of a Yahoo email address?), so I randomly drew between the two remaining blogs for that category. And the new winner is Tyson, over at Some Make Money.

Tyson, you’ll get a custom written article posted at EzineArticles.com, linking to two URLs of your choosing.

The August “Win Me As A Slave” contest is about one-third over, so here’s a recap of the results so far.

Lori is currently in the lead, with 13 entries. Rosa is in second, with 7 entries.

There are some other single entries, from people who had marked the blog as a favorite in Technorati before the contest started. Oh, and Enkay (probably unknowingly) has another entry from his recent link to my Valuing Your Blog post. So he’s in third.

Keep in mind that anyone can win, since all the entries go into a hat and one gets picked out. At the moment, Lori is the only one with creative entries, and there may very well be a special prize for creative entries (my current plan is to put the creative entries into a second hat and pick one of those for another prize).

A creative entry is anything outside of what has already been done. This can include offline promotion of the blog, as long as you have proof (take some pictures, or get the blog’s name on the cover of Newsweek, etc).

If I’ve miscounted entries or forgot to count something, be sure to let me know.

Thanks to all the entrants, it’s been fun so far seeing what everyone comes up with!