The Blogging Idol – buzz in blogosphere!

Sponsored Links

If you’ve not heard about blogging idol, then you’ve probably missed the latest buzz in the blogosphere. With a prize tag of 3000$, it is currently the biggest contest live in the bloggers world. What you’ve to do to participate? Well, nothing that serious. When you participate in the contest, you take a count of the subscribers that your blog boasts of. At the end of the contest, i.e 31st July, you have to calculate the increase in the number of subscribers. The contest is already live and some big bloggers like Jason have participated in it.

The Rules & Regulations of the competition, which you might just be intrested in knowing, are :

(Taken directly from here)

1. All participants must activate the Feedburner feed count at the beginning of the competition.
2. Participants will need to send a short email weekly (100-200 words), describing their strategies to gain RSS subscribes, and what they are doing on their blogs.
3. I will group all those emails and publish them on a single post every week, so that readers can follow and understand how participants are competing.
4. Blackhat methods will not be allowed, so you can’t fake stats, try to damage the blog of competitors and so on.
5. Paid promotion will not be allowed, else it would become a “who can spend more” contest. Any method where you need to spend money is not allowed therefore.
6. All other strategies and techniques are allowed (guest articles, contests where you don’t spend money, give-aways, controversial articles, free eBooks), so you are free to get creative
7. The winner will be the blogger that manages to increase his RSS subscriber base by the largest number (final count minus initial count).

What am I doing?

Nothing really, I am not too much interested in participating in the contest. Why? Well, because I agree with Jim, and Rajaie. They have actually pointed out some real shortcomings into the core concept. The criteria to judge the winner doesn’t actually count on your blogging capabilites. It counts down how many people are actually subscibing to your blog. People who are getting a lot of traffic, or whose blogs are in the mid phase, as I like to say, they’ll certainly have an edge over the others. You could refer 100’s of people by using blackhat methods. Though the RULE says that you’re not allowed to use any paid or blackhat methods ,3000$ is an amount which can do get anyone into unbelievable acts. And it’s practically impossible to keep a track of what the participants are doing when the count is over 100. I can ask people to create 100’s of e-mails and subscribe to my blog  and pay you a few bucks.

A good idea by Rajaie was to limit the amount on entrants by conducting interviews. That would obviously increase the competition between the participants and ensure that the activities get tracked so that the competition is fair to the best possible extent.

Although I really like the idea of a contest like that, what I don’t quite like is the criteria of judging the winners. That could be improved in the upcoming versions of the competition, if there are any.

What I suggest to you?

If you’re a blogger, then I’d recommend you to give it a try. It may be late, but it’ll motivate you to work hard and will certainly help you in the long run. And who knows, you might just be the one who bags away the prize.

Sponsored Links