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

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 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

• FamousBloggers.net – contest organizer
• MyBlogGuest.com our contest media partner
• WebmasterFormat.com – Webmaster Resource *new
• MMO social network – making money online tips
• DesignGizer.com a new design bookmark site
• Better Blogging for Bloggers blog
• DennisEdell.com – Dennis Edell *new
• IBlogZone.com a making money online blog
• CrazyEgg.com heat mapping tools
• SimplyFreshThemes.com Fresh Journal WP theme *new
• Kiesha @ WeBlogbetter.com Blogging tips & tricks *new
• JohnPaulAguiar.com – Twitter Dummy Guide *new

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!