$100 contest and new arrival

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

A while back I told everyone that I was starting work on a blog designed for monetization purposes. I was hoping that the blog would be ready and launched by today (1/1/2008) but I’ve not had the time to dedicate to writing the six “pillar posts” and the additional 12-15 posts I intend to launch it with. The article announcing the new blog also offered one contestant $100.00. Obviously since the blog is delayed in launching I can’t offer the $100.00 the same way I did originally, however I am still going to offer it. More on that in a few moments. First I wanted to share a few pictures of the latest “arrival” to the household.

This is Damascus a captive bred male ball python about 2.5-3 months old that I got from Zoo Creatures in Plaistow New Hampshire. Great staff, very knowledgable about their reptiles (and other animals). They are just downstairs from the New England Reptile Distributors facility. If you ever are in the market for a reptile I strongly recommend working with these folks no matter where you are at. Especially if your only choice is some place like Pet Smart or Petco.

And now back to the $100.00 (because I know that’s what you are all waiting for). Before I go any further let me make this perfectly clear since there was some confusion in the last contest giving away $50.00 regarding the rules.

• This contest is judged solely at MY discretion
• There will be no random drawings, or names picked out of a hat or anything of that nature
• What constitutes a winner is purely subjective. Subjected to my will and my opinion only
• Depending on how many entries I get and the situation I may or may not choose to tell everyone why you did or did not win. Again in the past this wasn’t too popular with some contestants. I’m not here to be popular I’m here to write a blog. And in this case give some $100.00
• You will actually have to do a little work for the $100.00, sorry but $100.00 doesn’t grow on trees. Don’t worry it’s easy work

If you’ve read all that, understand and agree with it we’ll get started on how to enter the contest, the rules, deadlines, and all that great stuff.

Entry

In order to be entered into the contest you need to do two things. The first one should be pretty obvious. Write a short article about this contest on your blog or website and LINK TO THIS ARTICLE from yours. Emphasis added because a few people in the last contest said they didn’t realize they had to link. I’d hate for someone to do everything else right but get disqualified just for not linking. So please link!

The second part of the entry is a little different. I want you to write an article for me, and here’s what I’m looking for.

• Topic: Anything you want having to do with pet snakes
• Length: At least 1200 words

Pretty simple right? Well there’s more to it. The articles I receive will potentially be used as posts on my new blog depending on the quality and need for the article. Every article has the potential to be used on the blog, but ONLY ONE PERSON WILL WIN THE $100.00! The writers of all articles that are used will of course receive full credit and links back to their own blogs or websites.

Rules

These are the entry rules, I went over some “need to know rules” about how I will conduct the contest previously in this post. Look up and you’ll see it.

1. You may enter as many times as you like, but each entry requires a new article to be written for it (only one blog/website article linking back to this article is necessary)
2. Upon submission of your article you are allowing it to be used as I see fit in my blog(s)
3. You agree I may not use anyones article at all, BUT I will still reward the $100.00 to someone assuming that a valid effort to write the article was put forth. If I just get a bunch of bare-minimum garbage that no one took any time to write and research I won’t give it away. I have faith that at the close of the contest I’ll be $100.00 poorer than I am today.
4. In order to win you must write a valid article that is of the proper length (1200 words+) on topic (snakes as pets), readable and understandable at a seventh grade reading level, and finally (here’s the “wildcard”) I must choose your entry as the winner. And again my choice is subjective to my opinion. In the end I am looking for the one article that stands out heads and tails above the rest. In fact depending on the quality this article could potentially be used as a pillar article on the new blog

Deadline

Contest will end at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time on 1/31/08. The number of entries will dictate how long before a winner is chosen, but I am aiming for 2/8/08 so I can get the $100.00 to you before Valentines day on 2/14/08 so you can get someone special, something a little “extra” special.

Submission guidelines

We’ll keep this simple. Please send it via email to ablogaboutnothing@gmail.com (subject-snake contest). Few things to keep in mind. Please put your entry in the body of the email (no attachments), make sure you include the subject “snake contest” with each entry. This is so I can make sure it isn’t trashed accidentally. Finally include a link to your article linking to this article so I can make sure everything is together.

Now you’ve read all that and you’re probably thinking that’s a lot of work for a measly $100.00, right? Consider it in real world terms. You’ll probably spend at best 1-2 hours on the entry including research and writing. Most people who write articles are paid around 0.02-0.04 per word. Most articles are around 800-1200 words on average. So do the math using the best scenario. 1200 words X 0.04 per word = $48.00. I’m offering double that. One to two hours of work for $100.00 doesn’t seem like very much work, does it?

Wrapping up I’ll just say I look forward to many entries and I really look forward to giving away $100.00. If you have any questions regarding the contest please feel free to comment this post with them so everyone can benefit from the answer.

Bonus Contest

Be choosen out of 500 people who subscribe to my email rss feed and win $50.00! You don’t need to link to this page, or anything else. Just sign up. One person will be randomly choosen out of the 500 and will be sent a check for $50.00! As “easy as pie”.

Posted in contests | 12 Comments »

And the winner is!

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Without further ado I’d like to announce the winner of A Blog about Nothing’s $50.00 blogging challenge. Actually I’m lying. In order to make this whole thing a little more interesting I thought I’d point out some of the entries that didn’t win and why.

• Antigrammar - Um, because that’s just scary
• A Frog to Kiss - The idea wasn’t original AND more importantly you can get some excellent header images custom made for you over at the DP forums
• Lost in Technology - Lacking in originality and I’m not a fan of pyramid “schemes” lol
• Rotus - While I appreciate the sarcastic wit it missed the technicality mark. That being “What would you spend it on to improve your BLOG?”
• Zybron - This was a pretty common entry/comment for this contest. Buy a domain name and move to a real self-host Word Press solution. Again not original
• Home Life - Didn’t follow the rules (no link back to the contest page). If you need a domain name you can definitely get one for far, far less than $35.00. Namecheap can provide you one for about $9.30 per year

Those are the ones I didn’t select. I hope none of you mind the back link I’ve provided and the fact that I told everyone why you didn’t win…

Who won? Steve O of Window on Life is the new owner of $50.00 for this post about using it for Youtube video posting. I will be attempting to contact Mr. “O” via email and/or his blogs contact information. Congratulations Steve! I realize $50.00 in the big scheme of things isn’t much but I’m looking forward to hearing how your idea works out!

In case anyone is wondering why Steve won it’s simply because his idea was not just original but pretty damn good if you ask me!

Posted in Blogging | 12 Comments »

The $50.00 blog challenge

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

A few days ago Darren of Problogger wrote a post asking if you would blog differently if you had money. It got me to thinking about the issue, but up until now I’ve not had a clear answer. I finally realized that an answer isn’t exactly what I’ll come up with, but instead I have a question of my own.

In Darren’s post he asks if we would blog differently if we had one million dollars. Reality is that the vast majority of us do not have that kind of disposable income to throw into blogging. Most of us do however have fifty dollars to throw into our blogging addictions. So if someone were to hand you $50.00 and tell you the only condition for its use is that it must go towards your blog, how would you spend it?

As for myself…

First things first

On the day it came to spend the money I would make sure my “house” was in order by taking some very basic steps

• Making certain my best post(s) are displayed prominently on the front page
• Ensuring that all of my links works with a dead link checker
• Using No-WWW, a Wordpress plugin to ensure that all links go to the non-www version of pages. If you don’t use wordpress you’ll have to check around and see what options are available for you
• Making sure that everything displays properly in a variety of browsers at a variety of resolutions
• Having a week, possibly even two weeks worth of posts written and scheduled out
• I would setup real time statistical monitoring so I could make adjustments on the fly if need be

Spending the money

The way I see it $50.00 is not very much money at all. So the only reasonable thing to do as far as I’m concerned is to put that money to work for me earning more money by bringing in highly targeted traffic. I’d spend some time deciding what method I would use but it would likely either be Google Adwords or a Stumble Upon traffic campaign. Either way I would spend a pretty decent chunk of time attempting to monetize the blog for that particular method.

Final thoughts

I would give it about a month and a half before I decided the overall benefits of the $50 I just spent. Of course I’d keep track of the day to day minutia, but I don’t think it would really paint a clear picture until about 6 weeks into the whole thing. Hopefully by that time traffic has evened out and what remains are faithful readers for the most part. I’ve seen other blogs do analysis’s of how much each reader is worth and that is something I would also do in order to determine how successful I had been.

Regardless of the short term success this is the type of thing that would benefit you the most by treating it as an ongoing project. It doesn’t matter if you have $20 or $100,000 if you don’t make it work you might as well just throw it in the toilet and flush.

How would you spend $50.00 on your blog? One lucky and creative winner will get a check for $50.00 from me in order to spend on their blog however they wish. In order to enter just this article. On December 1st I will choose one winner from all entries based on creativity, originality, and likelihood of success. Any takers?

Posted in Blogging | 26 Comments »