Congratulations to Kevin Henney who wins an iPod Shuffle for spotting our secret RSS-only message last Thursday.
Thanks to all of you who subscribed to the Marketing Pilgrim feed. We hope you’ll keep your subscription due to the great content, but just in case you were about to hit the “unsubscribe” button, you’ll be pleased to know we’ll be running another contest in the New Year.
I’m delighted to announce that Marketing Pilgrim is adding some new contributing authors, starting with Jordan McCollum. Why does that name sound so familiar? Jordan was one of the four finalists of our SEM Scholarship contest, beating out other entrants with her article “SEO is Pointless (But You Don’t Have to Tell Your Clients)“.
Jordan impressed me with her entry, and also won high praise from our judges, including this endorsement..
“Jordan’s is instructive and focused on where SEO techniques can be expanded on to bring long term value by becoming more intimately involved with the design of a site itself.”
With talent like that, we couldn’t resist asking Jordan if she’d be interested in bringing her expertise and solid writing to the readers of Marketing Pilgrim. Jordan was excited to join us, and you can expect to see 2-3 posts per week coming from her, starting this week.
If you’re curious how you too can have you photo appear on each comment you leave and in the “pilgrim readers” sidebar, you should consider joining our MyBlogLog.com community.
MyBlogLog tracks blog communities and their readers and is a great way to connect with other readers, discover new blogs, and even build some traffic for your own site.
Joining is quick and easy, and soon, we’ll all be able to enjoy your mugshot, alongside your words of wisdom! 
You should have noticed that a few weeks back I added the Snap link preview tool – the one that gives you a handy pop-up preview of any external link.
I have been meaning to ask you whether or not you found it useful or annoying. It looks like Darren Rowse asked the same thing of his readers and most of the comments are negative. So, assuming that you might think the same, I plan on removing the feature this week.
If you happen to love the feature and would like it to stay, please leave a comment. If your reaction is “good riddance”, I’d like to hear from you too!
I must admit, putting together the Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship contest was a lot of fun, hard work too, but mostly fun. There’s a lot of talented up and comers out there, and I believe many who entered the contest will become more familiar names in 2007.
During dinner at SES Chicago, David Temple suggested it would be good to hear from each entrant and see what they learned from their efforts to win. I asked David to put together a quick summary of his idea and what he learned. Here it is…
OK, so when I first heard about “blog tag”, it sounded like one of those chain-emails, you know the ones – “Pass this on to someone else and you’ll receive good luck.”
After being tagged by blogging-buddy Avinash, I figured it might be fun to share the requisite five things you don’t know about me. So here goes…
If you’ve not already subscribed to our RSS feed, now would be a good time, as the deadline for drawing is this Friday. We’ve not yet posted the secret message – available only to RSS subscribers – that will see one lucky winner receive an iPod or possibly a Zune.
Full details of the contest can be found here.
Here’s that feed again – http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketing-pilgrim
The hidden message could come at any time before Friday!
P.S. For those of you reading this message in your RSS reader, this is NOT your cue to enter, this is just a reminder for those who have yet to subscribe.
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