I know I get some traffic from Marketing Pilgrim each month.

John – First thanks for visiting and saying hi. You’ll probably recognize a few of the people who comment here.

I agree with you about most contests. I don’t care for the ones that pick a random keyword phrase. I don’t think they test all that much or really have any value. The Marketing Pilgrim contest is different. The first step is writing an article on some aspect of search marketing. The quality of the article will be the deciding factor so it needs to be a well researched and written article.

Then you try to direct all the traffic you can at the page. Last time we each had a week, but this time we’ll have four wees. People used all sorts of strategies to direct traffic. Last time the big winners were viral marketing, PPC, and taking advantage of existing networks. With the extra few weeks this time organic listing will probably play a greater part, while all of the above will still apply. With only one week link building wasn’t a big issue, but with four weeks a few links built early might affect the organic listings.

Also since Marketing Pilgrim is a site with authority on-page optimization can probably play a role.

Again I agree with you about most contests. No contest is perfect and that’s also the case with this one. But Andy’s contest does rely more on real seo/m skills to succeed. It can’t test everything, but it does a good job of testing some. I know I enjoyed entering an article last time and also spending the week promoting the article. It was an interesting experience and it made me think about seo/m in some ways I hadn’t previously. I think that participating did help me become a little better at what I do and that was the reward I was looking for and will hopefully have again.