What Did You Learn From Our SEM Scholarship Contest?

I actually wrote about the experience a few days after the third week’s numbers came in. So instead of re-posting the whole thing…

My Contest Experience

First I was impressed with the quality of the winner and entries and have no beef with those at all. I have a whole new set of great blogs to add to my blogroll (though nobody added mine, which has me scrutinizing it thoroughly.)

Truthfully, I was under the impression that the page-views were those which would be generated through interest “as discovered” on Andy’s pages rather than those generated “by all means you wish.”

That is, through links here on Marketing Pilgrim. Never did I even consider buying ads on PPC to send traffic to my write-up, nor did I even send it link equity from my other sites. I thought it was my peers who frequent Andy’s blog who would be reviewing things – so just a simple misunderstanding.

Given the great quality of the entries, I think it came out well in the end anyhow – the panel showed good judgement in their choices and I have enjoyed it!

As the great quote goes, “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, cowboy.”

Andy, first thank you for running the contest. I really enjoyed the week of driving traffic to my article and got to read some pretty good articles by people I didn’t know about prior to the contest.

I too blogged about my experience shortly after the end of the contest

SEM Contest Results

Much of my strategy involved putting my social network to work and seeing what it could do. I emailed people I know and asked them to email people they know. I did similar things on the forums where I’m most active. It was interesting to see how far my network could reach in a few days and gave me a benchmark for the future.

Prior to this contest I had never attempted to drive traffic to a specific page in such a short amount of time. My focus has generally been on results that would come longer term.

I think the shorter duration helped me better understand viral and buzz marketing and gave me ideas for the future about how to spread an idea farther and faster.

It was a learning experience to try and keep track of what was being said about my article and seeing what I could do to keep the discussion going and hopefully get more views because of the continued discussion.

I learned after the contest what some other participants had tried and still wonder why I didn’t think to try a few of those ideas myself. For the life of me I still don’t know why I didn’t spend time on a PPC campaign.

Mostly I learned that there are quite a few SEOs out there that I didn’t know before. And that many have some very interesting ideas and are good people and hopefully by the next contest I’ll know them better.

Thanks again Andy for running the contest. I never imagined when I submitted my article what a whirlwind week it would be and how much I would enjoy that week.

I look forward to the next contest.

testing…

for some reason I am not able to post in here today…

Well since the article runs on your site, you can’t do much organic search wise… I thought a week was fun

It’s all about the title. I’m sure everyone has theories about what caused who to get how much traffic, but you can look at the titles, and pretty well guess the order their traffic will rank in.

Andy I don’t think the one week was good or bad, just different. You could run a similar contest for six months and it would simply mean we would need to employ a different strategy and different tactics to win.

Joost I think even with the article here you could still have worked for organic results. I think the Marketing Pilgrim site carries a certain amount of authority with it, probably more than many of our own sites. We could have focused efforts into finding long tail phrases that could have brought search traffic with it. I know I checked my own article a few days after the contest began and was able to find it for some phrases. Not necessarily phrases that were searched often, but a different article might have drawn more searched for phrases.

The articles were unlikely to draw more competitve phrases, but perhaps a longer contest would allow more link building as a tactic. Andy I’m sure you’d enjoy us all working a few months building links for the site as well so maybe a longer contest would be a good option for next time.

What I would have liked was more time in between finding out about the contest and submitting the article. I don’t know when you first started promoting the contest, but by the time I learned of it the contest was already into its third week. That might have more to do with me though, than the contest. The announcements were out there and in places I frequent. I just missed them.

After the contest I was thinking of different ways to run a contest like this and I thought another layer of complexity might be to add conversions in somehow. Traffic is only good if it does something once it gets to the page.

I’m not sure what the best way to implement something like this would be, but maybe there’s a way to take the contest another step and see which of us could not only get traffic to our article, but also get someone to move from our article to a predetermined page.

It might not be completely workable, but it’s an idea.

I think contests like these can get tired if they don’t change so maybe a longer contest would be a good idea for the next one. Either way I’m sure it will be fun.

Cool. And #1 too.