Thursday, May 17, 2007 Toral: Blog writing contest By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
LAST week, I joined an online writing group project organized by Darren Rowse of Problogger.net. It was a four-day activity where interested bloggers will make a blog post about any Top 5 stuffs and submit the link through his website.
He published all the entries submitted and promoted a sponsor in the process. Nearly 900 bloggers joined and made their own entries. There was one winner who was randomly picked and got $1,000.
I made a post entitled “Top 5 Things Why I’m Writing a Blogging Book” as a project entry. After the activity, I found myself getting almost 40 links from various bloggers around the world in less than 10 days. This is valuable, as it increases blog ranking and authority in Technorati.com. It is assumed that the more blogs or websites that link to you, the more authoritative your site becomes as a source of information.
Based from this experience, I got inspired and started a small writing contest that intends to find out who are the emerging influential blogs in 2007. These are blogs that were created anytime from August 1, 2006 to the present and had attracted a growing number of readers.
To join, bloggers had to make a post and nominate their choice of emerging influential blogs and post a comment at http://digitalfilipino.blogspot.com, giving information about their entry.
Beginning this Saturday, a list of blog choices and entries submitted will be published and every week thereon. On August 1, the top 10 choices will be announced based on highest votes and ten entries from bloggers will win $100 each.
As of this time, nearly 10 bloggers have already submitted their entries.
What makes the project exciting is that it puts the spotlight on new blogs and anyone in the world can join. More often than not, we tend not to look at new sites anymore and get tied up to what we usually surf or visit.
I hope that with this writing project, our eyes will be opened to new bloggers that are doing something great online today.
After rolling out this project, I found a useful online tool in monitoring live website traffic—Performancing Metrics (http://pmetrics.performancing.com).
Through its “Spy Feature,” I’m able to find out who are visiting my website. It also shows their IP address, their country of origin and platform information such as browser, operating system, among others.
This website tool is free and I encourage start-up websites to take advantage of it.
