Search Engine Journal is launching a new Guest Blogging competition where readers of Search Engine Journal can contribute articles, tutorials, timely search marketing news and other content over the course of a one week period (beginning 4/8/08 and ending 4/15/08).
The Grand Prize is over $9,000 in Search Marketing services and products including :
- $1,000 in Blog Reviews & Links from SponsoredReviews.com
- $500 in free advertising from Text Link Ads
- 6 Month Free Subscription for Adapt Paid Search Management Software (a $1,194 value)
- One Year Subscription to Keyword Discovery (a $599 value)
- $500 from Pepperjam Search
- 12 months of Google Shopping Product Feed Management from SingleFeed
- 3 months free at SEOBook (a $300 value)
- SEO Audit & Site Makeover from Search Engine Journal Services (a $5000+ value)
- Submittals of up to 4 sites to Aviva Directory Network (a $400+ value)
- Various 2nd and 3rd place prizes
We may be adding more prizes to this list very soon, so keep posted!
What Can You Write About?
This competition is open to all writers and bloggers, not only those in the search marketing field. So, you can write about anything from blogs to blogging, SEO to paid search, Twitter to RSS, your thoughts on Yahoo or Google, even Top 10 or Top 101 Lists are acceptable.
Be bold, and be creative :)
We will then review and publish this reader contributed content on the Search Engine Journal site, along with our daily search engine news coverage and search marketing tutorials. We will be publishing your guest posts over a two week period (4/16/08 to 4/30/08).
All contributors will benefit from this competition via :
- Exposure of your expertise to the Search Marketing industry
- Exposure of your company : We will add a bi-line an link to your company at the bottom of your post.
- Long term benefit as these posts will be indexed in search engines and housed on our authority site.
- Exposure to our RSS subscriber base of 15,000+
- All Entrants Will Receive a $100 VIP Coupon for SponsoredReviews.com!
- And so much more.
The way the competition works is this.
1. Submit your original tutorial, guest post or article via emailing it to lorenmichaelbaker@gmail.com (yes, you can submit multiple posts)
2. Include a 75×75 image of the author (or send a link to your Facebook or another profile with a pic)
3. SEJ staff will review these articles, edit them (if needed), then post them on the blog over a 2 week
period.
4. Judging of the articles will be a multi-tier process looking at social media voting, reader voting, traffic of the individual posts and links to the posts. The voting will be measured 2 weeks after the initial publishing date.
So, we essentially give the responsibility of the voting to the readers :
SEJ user voting at post level + Stumbles + Comments + Sphinns + Diggs + Unique Users + Page Views (Google Analytics) + Mixx Votes + Incoming Links (as measured by Yahoo) = Final Tally
We do not encourage contributors to game the social media voting systems, please let the users of those systems vote for the stories. You can of course promote your posts to friends using IM, Twitter, Facebook, your own blog … etc.
5. Grand Prize will be assigned to the post with the highest final tally as voted upon. We will be transparent about reporting these votes and will rank all of the guest blog posts when we make our final announcement. The Grand Prize will be announced on 5/19/08.
Search Engine Journal will issue a new competition every other month with new sponsors and alter voting tally according to industry trends.
You should receive an email tonight.
Congrats, on an innovative idea!
Now, EVERYONE will copy it :-)
SearchEnginesWeb will definitely enter and of course, will win hands down!
{sorry no pic}
sounds interesting…i’ll definitely look into it
Can we submit something we’ve already published or does it have to be exclusive to the contest?
Excellent question Andy.
If you’ve already published the article, I’d like to request that you remix it in to something similar and then even reference your original article if you see fit.
Update : I have several other companies contacting me about wanting to sponsor the competition and it looks like we will be offering over $10,ooo in search marketing service prizes.
More to come soon :)
Can it be content we published on our own blogs or is it content just for SEJ?
@ Dan : Content which you can contribute to SEJ.
Great idea, will submit my post in the next few days!
Are there recommended length or number of words?
Will you accept all the guest posts which are submitted ? If not , then the ones which you decide to accept and publish, will you inform the authors before hand ?
@Steven : 200 or more words.
@Abhijeet : If all of the guest posts are relevant to blogging or search marketing, yes. And, I will inform the authors of the guest posts which are not using.
Thanks, Loren
and what is maximum recommended length?
@Steven : 4,000 words
It’s really a great idea, Loren! Seems I will attend this contest :-)
No Cash Prize? :(
Do we need to submit the article in a particular format? Simple text? Doc? HTML?
Thanks!
Great idea!. I think I will participate in this competition.
Wow, those prizes look really impressive! And most of them are even useful for people who have been in SEO/SEM for years.
Loren,
Excellent idea. You will receive another post from me shortly. I am definitely interested (as everyone else). In winning this package. One question for you. Can we give away this package to one of our clients if we win?
Thank you sir.
I will probably drop you a line as I am bored and there is nothing to do here. :D
This is also great contest for bloggers and writers. I hope I can still make it when I am running out of time.
Yeah… great contest. it’s $10,000 now.
wow… what a prizes… :P
blogged at :
http://www.indocontest.com/2008/04/10/search-engine-journal%e2%80%99s-guest-blogging-competition/
Great idea !
Having submitted my article today when will I or anyone know its status??
Was wondering the same thing actually…
oopss i lost my chance :(
Another amazing contest for writers and bloggers. I will definitely join this week..
So the deadline is April 15 yet. This means I can no longer join. Fine.I just post my supposed entry in my blog.