New SEM Scholarship Contest Coming in March

I wanted to give you advance notice that we’ll be running a new Search Engine Marketing Scholarship contest at the end of March. I’ve listened to a lot of feedback, and addressed two common suggestions:

1. The next contest will be judged over a longer timeframe. This will allow entrants to apply many SEM talents, such as link building, and will ensure the winner wasn’t necessarily the one who managed to get a spike of traffic in a few days.
2. You asked for advance notice, so here it is. Sometime mid-March, I’ll make the official call for entries. I’ll give a two week entry period, so you’ll have plenty of time to digest any rule changes or formulate your strategy. With this post, regular readers are getting even further advance notice.

We’re working on some great prizes and have already confirmed the following judges:

• Rand Fishkin
• Neil Patel
• Kim Krause Berg
• Andrew Goodman
• Jim Boykin
• Todd Malicoat
• Kalena Jordan
• Lee Odden
• Aaron Wall
• Jennifer Laycock
• Barry Schwartz
• Laura Thieme

If you’d like to donate a prize – and get some great publicity – send an email to [scholarship AT marketingpilgrim.com] (I’ll be out of town, so may not get back to you immediately).

So get your thinking-caps on. We’ll be looking for articles on paid search, optimization and social media and evaluating based upon traffic and judges’ decision.