Comments on: SEM Contest Results

By: This Week In SEO - 4/13/07 - TheVanBlog

This Week In SEO - 4/13/07 - TheVanBlog — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:15:29 +0000

[...] If you’ve been coming here for any length of time you’re likely aware that I’m a fan of Marketing Pilgrim’s SEM Scholarship Contest. I generally haven’t cared for seo contests, but I like this one a lot. You can read about my experience with the first contest to understand why. My schedule kept me out of the contest this time around, but there have been some very good articles contributed. From what I’ve read so far I think the quality of the articles has improved compared to the first contest. [...]

By: Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Contest: Spring 2007 - TheVanBlog

Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship Contest: Spring 2007 - TheVanBlog — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:14:32 +0000

[...] I participated in the first contest and had a lot of fun as well as learning a lot about driving traffic to a page in a short amount of time. You can read more about my previous experience in my post talking about the results of the contest and my post discussing seo contests in general. The latter post has several links to some additional information about the first Marketing Pilgrim contest. [...]

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 05:14:05 +0000

Yuri $200 isn’t a bad investment for $6000 in prizes. I think my not taking advantage of PPC was a mistake in the contest though I probably wasn’t going to buy the 700+ clciks it would have taken. I agree with you that a lot of this contest came down to the strength of your network, but if I had applied a few of the techniques that I didn’t attempt I think a few hundred more visitors would have been possible. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered for this week, but it would have in any of the other weeks.

Matt as much as winning would have been nice it really was about the experience for me and what I was able to take away and learn from the contest. It’s provided a baseline for me about what I can do and it’s proven to me the value of social networks online. The majority of the views to my article were actually direct to the page, which I suspect were the emails that were sent out. And many of the people who received emails are not people who had ever heard of seo before. Shows the power of an offline network affecting online results.

It was ain fun and interesting contest and I’ve heard there will be more from Marketing Pilgrim in the future. I’d be glad to participate again and test some new theories and try out some new techniques.

By: Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:16:43 +0000

Unlucky steve. Would have been hard to beat the number of hits the winner got. So you can take some comfort knowing that you must have done something right if would have won any other week.

By: Yuri

Yuri — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:16:28 +0000

I paid $10 for 65 visitors in two days and it says the CPC is 0.15. If I had spent $200, I’d beat the winner just from PPC

The marvelous thing about PPC is that you can spend a large budget quickly, if you set a large daily budget, high max default bid and use the “Accelerate” option.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:17:45 +0000

I hadn’t seen that about Digg, but it makes sense. Still there are plenty of other social bookmarking sites that could have been put to use. Of course to use them right you would need to be an active user for a period longer than the week of the contest.

I agree a big part of this is who’s got the strongest network, but I think there are things you could still do outside your network to get views. A site like Marketing Pilgrim should have enough link juice for any page to get some long tail searches right away. I would imagine the site is spidered frequently. I know my own article has been ranking #1 for various terms which include both ’seo’ and ‘karma.’ Unfortunately for me they aren’t searched much.

I also think the link out for trackbacks could have brought in a good number of views. I’ve linked out to certain sites to reference an article and had 10-20 views on my post by the next morning. It’s not necessarily the most targeted traffic, but for a contest like this it’s about the unique traffic and not so much the targeted traffic.

True buying traffic through PPC is another way to overcome a lacking network. But it’s perfectly valid and if done right you wouldn’t need to spend much money. Imagine finding keyphrases you could get for $0.20. If you were willing to spend $50 you could bring in 250 views to your article assuming the phrases you bid on were searched that often in a week.

I agree this probably came down to who had the strongest network, bit there were certainly ways you could have gotten an extra few hundred views. Wouldn’t have been enough for me to win this week, but would have any other week.

By: SEO Oregon Firm - FishSEO

SEO Oregon Firm - FishSEO — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 07:29:03 +0000

Great Effort! I must say, using your friends in SEO contests is the key.

By: Yuri

Yuri — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 06:13:56 +0000

You could only get Dugg for this contest if you were Kevin Rose. The site was blocked from being dugg the last week, obviously from someone spamming it or it was perceived as spamming (10-20 stories a week 3 weeks in a row).

Other than that, as I said earlier, contests are won by those, who have the largest network of people, be it friends, bloggers or forum fellows. Except for when you got money to burn on PPC, I guess.