The big contest kicks off tomorrow - had to make this post first! :)

You guys probably remember the competition I had with four other bloggers starting a month ago - I faced off against Thomas Sinfield, Ian Fernando, Internet Babel and Slyvisions. First off, let me thank the four - it ended up being a friendly, good natured contest and the best thing is that all of us gained subscribers, traffic and most important a buzz in the blogosphere, something that we were looking for at the beginning. A joint contest was an interesting one as it was my first, and the others doing well gave me motivation - without them, there’s no way in hell that I would have written so many guest posts nor devoted so much time to this :razz:

What was the end result? You can see for yourself here. Hover over each number to see whose it was.

The end result for TUK was an increase of 137 RSS subscribers, more than double what we started off with. Internet Babel did well too, pushing me all the way and landing up with an increase of 129.

Tallies

Slyvisions 32
Ian Fernando 61
Thomas Sinfield 82
Internet Babel 129
The University Kid 137

As you can see, relatively good results all around.

What did I do to win the RSS competition?

Guest Post - ones on John Cow, Tyler Cruz, Super Blogging Tips and Bloggin-Ads definitely helped drive traffic and subscribers, and increase exposure at the very least. I will be following up in a week and ranking how good guest posting was on each of those blogs, so that others who want to guest post have something to base their decisions on. :)

Entrecard URL change: I generally get around 20 - 40 visitors from Entrecard daily; what I did was change the URL for my profile there to link directly to the contest post. It helps ;)

Constantly, constantly remind my readers about it - you can check out ways to boost RSS feed count and 5 Reasons you should subscribe to my feed for more about that :)

Joining Bloggeries - a sweet forum by bloggers, for bloggers - check it out as it has some good debate. Sent a decent amount of traffic. :)

Comment on other blogs - I didn’t leave many, but the ones I leave I tried to be either extremely helpful or extremely controversial. Guess which type sent more traffic? :)

Good luck on running your own contest, and I hope all of you guys will stay around. :)

Affiliate Marketing

I’m now at around $15 - $25 a day with affiliate marketing, with a combination of pay per click and various other methods of marketing… nothing substantial, but it’s good to have income coming in from additional sources. $20 a day is an additional $600 a month - we’ll see how it goes, but I’m going to look at scaling over the next few days.

Scammers

I announced the winners yesterday for the contest post… and had three people emailing me, all of whom claimed to have win, all of whom which had different Paypal emails. I’ve emailed the winner of the subscription half and will wait for his reply - already got the mail from EGK. :) Will send out the money to both tomorrow.

I’m also going to expose a vile scammer on here in the next couple of days - I promised I wouldn’t swear much on here but this guy is a complete douchebag. Sometimes you’ve gotta speak up to save the community; he’s a Wordpress designer, something that a few of you use so I’ll be warning you guys to beware. I found out the hard way - $200.00 down the drain :(

By the way, I got in through to the next round in BloggerNoobs domain name tourney - head on over and vote :)

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