Champion Blogger 2009 Update

First off I would like to say thank you to everyone who has joined the contest so far and all of you who have helped to promote it.

I now have some updates on how the contest is going to work as well as a few things that you will need to do ahead of the contest.

If you have no idea what I am talking about or want to sign-up to the contest then I suggest you visit the registration post:

Champion Blogger 2009

In that post I mentioned that you would be tested in three areas of a bloggers life:

• Promotion
• Monetization
• Writing

This post will give you more details about what will be involved in each. There will be a top 10 in each category with the person in first place collecting 20 points, 2nd = 18  points, 3rd = 16 points, etc.

This may be changed to a top 20 depending on how many entries are received for the contest. The winner of the contest will most likely be the blogger that performs well in more than one of the areas being tested.

Promotion:

As you will know it is important to promote yourself as a blogger, one way of judging your success is by how many subscribers your blog has. To test your powers of promotion I will be seeing who can improve their subscriber count the most during the competition.

I will take your subscriber count at the start of the contest and compare this to your subscriber count at the end of the contest, you will then be ranked depending on how many new subscribers you have gained.

I will be posting about ways to increase your subscriber count on my blog during the contest, so don’t forget to sign up to my RSS feed.

Monetization:

Another area that bloggers have to consider is monetization, I thought long and hard about how I was going to test this and decided that I will test you all on how you sell the same product.

Seeing as we are all bloggers I picked a very prominent product in the world of blogging at the moment: The Thesis Theme.

You will need to sign-up to sell thesis if you do not already have an account. If you sign up using the link from this post then I can track your sales through the admin panel. If you already have an account, you can either sign-up for a new one just for this contest or I will have to arrange to see how many you have sold during the contest.

Sign up as a Thesis affiliate now!

Writing:

The final area in which you will be judged is your blog writing. Every blogger in will have to write one post on their blog that they wish to be submitted to this contests writing section. You will add a small line at the bottom of the post stating that it is your entry into the writing section of this contest, with a link back to the Champion Blogger Contest page.

I will then create a list of these posts and will open it up to the public to vote for their favourite post from the ones submitted. The winner of this section will be the blogger whos post gets the most votes.

The deadline for this section will be earlier than the contest finish date to allow time for voting.

What do I do now?

1. If you have not already done so, enter yourself into the contest.
2. Check you are listed as a contestant on the contest home page..here.
3. Check that you Feed count is displayed on the contest homepage, if not then you either need to create a Feed burner account for your feed, or enable the ‘Awareness API’ function of your Feed burner feed. If you have done this and your count is still not displayed then contact me.
4. Sign-up as a thesis affiliate. Remember to use the same email address that you signed up to the contest with.
5. Start thinking about how you are going to promote yourself and ideas for your killer blog post

I am going to do weekly updates on the contest and would love to have feedback from my contestants. Feel free to drop me an email every Friday with what you have done over the last week in an attempt to win the contest, I will post them in the weekly update posts along with a link back to your blog. (No more than 150-200 words, great way to promote yourself).

Contest Finish Date: 12th December (Gives you plenty of time)

Finally, don’t forget that you can pick up 10 points very easily to get you off the mark, see the bottom of the Sign-up post, this could make a big difference come the end of the contest.

Feel free to share your views below.