If In Doubt, Ask Rea Maor

Internet GEEK Rea Maor claimed to own a great many unknown websites which are black-listed by Google for no apparent reason. In my opinion, it could probably be due to his plans for Internet dominance, which puts him in direct confrontation with Google's own ambitions. His only known sites which is not black listed by Google (it is still displaying Adsense ads) is AskReaMaor dot com.

Mr Maor was recently given an Apple iPhone by his online friend(can you introduce such kind of friend to me?) but he couldn't get network support for it from where he is situated, which is like 7000 miles away from any AT&T relay station in the US of A! Hence, he is going to give it away in a no-holds-barred contest in the form of a lottery draw.

To enter, write a small paragraph, no less than 100 words long, about his blog AskReaMaor dot com with relevant links stated in his contest page. You must also link to any post you especially liked, for me that will be iPhone death - sooner than predicted. To earn bonus entries for the raffle, the usual Stumble it or submit the contest post to Social Networking sites action applies. If you have other creative ways, surprise Mr Maor, he might award you with bonus tickets.

Win $100 from a Gentleman

A kind and generous Gentleman over at whassupjack dot com is holding a contest where a lucky winner can walk away with $100 cold hard cash! To be exact, the blog owner's name is Mike Gentleman who started whassupjack dot com for fun and also as a filter site for hot search topics. Mike run the blog in his spare time, when he is not trading stocks and futures in the finacial markets.

The $100 prize money represents good value as it is an easy contest to enter. You earn entries by subscribing to his RSS feed, commenting on his posts and/or blog about it. You can choose to enter through any of the 3 methods, or like Mr Gentleman said, the smart ones will do all 3 and earn 5 entries. The contest ends 31 Aug and winner will be drawn on 1st Sept, so hurry and submit your entries.

Here comes the Shuffle

The blog review contest I entered in June was randomly selected as the winner! The 1GB iPod Shuffle was delivered to me and here's a pic of it.

Thanks to Mark, you should check out his site, Productivity501, for more productivity tips.

Free LG 24" LCD Monitor Giveaway Contest

The Sneaky Bastard is on a direct collision course with the dot com mogul by offering similar prizes in their separate blog contest! Expect sparks to fly!! But I’m gonna put my money on Prija sneaking past the finishing line first, on the basis of him offering early bird bonus draw of a copy of 4-Hour Work Week, as well as grand prize draw in mid Sept.

The grand prize of a 24 inch LCD Monitor is sponsored by Elite Baseball Instruction, which is a four-part series on baseball training.

This contest ends 09/15/07, so you have roughly 2 weeks’ time to get paid an award winning LCD monitor. A good reason to enter early is that the winner of the early bird draw will get their blog url and tagline posted on the original contest page. With the popularity of Cash for Comments, this valuable backlink will surely generate good amount of traffic for your site.

Games Convention Asia 2007

The big boys of gaming are heading my way to this sunny island in the tropics! It will be games games and more games as Nintendo, Sony and Electronic Arts have all announced that they will be spearheading this year's Games Convention Asia in Singapore.

According to the press release (via MCV), Nintendo will use the show to launch the revolutionary Wii console in the Singapore market. About 9 months after officially launching in the major markets in Japan, US and Europe, the Wii is finally here!



The Games Convention Asia 2007 will be held from 6th - 9th September at Suntec City Singapore. I'll definitely be there to grab a set of this hot gadget.

Sony Playstation 3 Giveaway Contest

Darin Carter of darin.cc is giving away a free Sony Playstation 3 game console in his blog promotion. Darin is an entrepreneur and has been involved in Internet Marketing for over 9 years. In his blog, he shares his knowledge of Internet Marketing with the world, and wants to make a difference in helping others market their websites effectively!

This free Playstation 3 giveaway contest is co-sponsored by IAWMD – The International Association of WebMasters and Designers. To enter, just blog about the contest or write a review of his blog, with proper links as required by Darin. Multiple entries are accepted and contest close on 31 Aug 2007.

I Really Want to Win a Free iPhone!

The internet marketing guru Mr Gary Lee is giving away a brand new 8GB Apple iPhone to generate some buzz around his blog and also get quality backlinks from high PR sites. Yes you heard right, he is really giving away a free iphone!

He also wants to promote his work-in-progress project about golf equipment as well as another online shopping site which he had been working with Ms Danielle. Go shop at PinkDeals.net and get your online coupon code and save some money!

While many people camped outside Apple stores for days just to be the first in line to get the iPhone on launch day, Gary cruise by the short queue at his local Apple store and got himself two 8gb iPhone instead of one which was originally intended.

This ultra cool and sleek iphone will not be launch in local market here till sometime next year, so imagine if I can get lucky in this contest and win the iphone, it would be something special. Even though I don’t think I will be able to use the iphone with local telcos due to phone lock, I’m sure it will come in really useful as a babe’s magnet and ice-breaker anywhere I whip it out!

Mad Cowpetition

Many of you must have taken notice of the invasion of the mad cow, taking the blogosphere by storm over the past 2 months. If you haven't, then you must have been living under a martian rock! Even more had been living off the free milk delivered to them on a daily basis. So when the end of the barn was announced earlier this month, many milk drinkers worldwide must have felt a sickening jolt to their system.

Lo and behold, it potentially means their daily calcium intake will cease as the farm was to be taken down by some leagal beaver. To the relief of the faithful milk drinkers, it was just a mis-timed April fool's prank and the farm's door will stay wide open and continue to produce milk for all the boys and girls!

Not only that, JohnCow.com is holding a cowpetition, giving away a ultraasuperdeluxeawesomeradical prize of your choice worth $500 that is made available by the coolest web hosting provider in the pasture.

If you fancy your chance to win a Playstation 3, an Xbox360, a Nintendo Wii or an iPhone, be sure to check out their mad cow blog for full contest details.

Breaking Traditions

'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death.
I'm very disappointed with that attitude.
I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.'
- Bill Shankly

Most of you will know that I am a fanatic fan of European football, in particular English football. If you are new here or don’t know this fact about me, perhaps this is a good time to check out my “About Me” page. However, I’ve never posted anything remotely related to football on this blog before. Since the English Premier League’s 2007/2008 season will kick off in less than 24hrs, I thought I’ll break tradition and post a few tidbits about the English Premier League.

1. The Premier League was formed on 27 May 1992.

2. The number of teams in the Premier League was trimmed from 22 to 20 at the end of the 1994/1995 season.

3. Since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, the title has been won by only 4 teams – Manchester United (9 times), Arsenal (3 times), Chelsea (twice) and Blackburn Rovers (once).

4. Former Sheffield United striker Brian Deane scored the first ever Premiership goal in a 2-1 win over Manchester United.

5. The fastest goal in the Premiership was scored by Tottenham Hotspur’s Ledley King, who found the net against Braford City after only 10 seconds in a 3-3 draw.

6. Former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler holds the record of scoring the fastest hat-trick in the Premiership. He took 4 minutes 33 seconds to complete his hat-trick against Arsenal at Anfield on 28 Aug 1994.

7. Evergreen Teddy Sheringham is the oldest goal scorer in the Premiership. He was 40 when he scored for West Ham against Portsmouth on Boxing Day 2006.

8. Manchester United became the first team to score 1000 goals in the Premiership in the 2005/2006 season after Christiano Ronaldo scored in a 4-1 defeat by Middlesbrough.

9. Arsenal is the only other team to have reached the 1000-goal mark.

10. Former Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United striker Alan Shearer holds the record for the worst number of Premiership goals with 260.

11. Alan Shearer’s 15 million move from Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United in July1996 was a Premiership record that lasted nearly 5 years.

12. Leeds United broke that record when they paid West Ham 18m for Rio Ferdinand in Nov 2000.

13. The highest fee paid for a teenager is 27m by Manchester United when they signed Wayne Rooney from Everton in 2004.

14. The youngest player to play in the Premiership is Fulham’s Matthew Briggs who was 16 years and 65 days old when he came on as a sub in Fulham’s 3-1 defeat by Middlesbrough on 13 May 2007.

15. The oldest debutant in the Premiership was Fernando Hierro, when he turned out for Bolton Wanderers against Fulham on 21 Aug 2004, at the age of 36.

16. Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs is the player with the most number of Premiership medals. The Welsh wing wizard has 9 medals from the title winning seasons in 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2007.

17. Tottenham Hotspurs’ goalkeeper Paul Robinson holds the record for scoring the goal from the longest distance in the Premiership – 88 metres. On 17 March 2007, Robinson took a freekick from just outside his own penalty area, the ball was pumped upfield, bounced over the head of Watford’s goalkeeper and into goal.

18. The other 2 goalkeepers to have scored in the Premiership were Peter Schmeichel (for Aston Villa against Everton) and Brad friedal (for Blackburn Rovers against Charlton Athletic).

19. Portsmouth’s goalkeeper David “Calamity” James ironically holds the most number of clean sheets in Preimership history. The record stands at 143 as of 14 May 2007.

20. The most number of goals conceded in a season by a team was by Swindon Town in the 1993/1994 season when their defence leaked in 100 goals.

After nearly 3 months of off season "cold turkey" treatment, I can't wait for the new season to kick off! Football fans, are you ready for the new season? Stock up the beers and the chips, dust off those lazy couches, let the games begin!

Review of Thoof.com

I have often promote the idea of submitting your posts to social book marking sites or article directories to create exposure and attract traffic to your blog. I have just found a new website which allow us to do that and many more useful features.

Thoof.com is a website that offers interesting news articles, websites, videos, photographs, and other links from around the web. Everything on the site is posted by Thoof readers, and can also be improved and edited by those same readers. What makes Thoof unique is a sophisticated algorithm which discovers a reader's interests and tailors the stories to each reader's individual tastes. Every Thoof reader will see a personalized page with stories he or she will find interesting. All that you, as a reader, have to do is simply read what you like, and Thoof takes care of the rest! In short, Thoof is a smart site which has the capability to customize to your reading interest and feed you with personalized news. Isn't it great?

I was immediately sold to this revolutionary feature and signed up as a member without any hesitation. Registration was really a breeze, it was completed in under 60 seconds! You just provide a valid email address and will receive a welcome email from Thoof in your inbox. You have to click on the link to validate your email and continue the registration process, you enter a password, and then choose a user ID, and you are done! Simple as that!

Next, I submitted one of my post with ease too. I click on the submit story tag, enter the post url, post title, a short summary of the post and type in at least 2 tags to describe the categories that my story falls into.

Then I click on submit story button and was given a HTML code of a ThoofRank button, simply cut and paste this HTML code into the blog entry or web page story that you are submitting and you are done! You can return to the main menu and your submitted post will be on the front page! Expose to the thousands of readers who can read it and thus attract them to visit your blog.

Lucky 7s Contest Winners

OK folks, the random draw had been conducted and winners picked, it's time to announce the winners of the Lucky 7s contest and give a complete closure to this exercise.

My heartfelt thanks to all who participated and those who took the trouble to give a shout-out to the contest. My heartiest congrats to all winners!

OK, the 6 consolation prizes of $7 each goes to:

Aldwin Ho - Struggling Blogger Ramblings

Ruchir - WebScape

Enkay - Enkay Blog

Alvarado - The Ice Dragon Project

Miriguy - Dirty Little Secrets

Matt Huggings - Entrepreneurial Blog

And the top prize winner of $77 is (drum roll please.......):

RamKarthik - Daily Tech News

All winners will be contacted to confirm your PayPal address in order for payment to be processed.

Search Engine Marketing Blog

Search Engine Marketing is a blog created by Darin Carter to help educate the public on search marketing techniques. Darin had over 9 years of internet marketing experience and now controls an annual marketing budget of 4 millions at his current marketing post with an online company. That is certainly online credibility you can count on!

In one of Darin’s many useful post, “How to Escape Google’s Supplemental Index”, he shared 5 tips on how to get out of the Google hell. In those 5 tips, Darin talked about writing unique content, link building your way via more trusted links to gain “overall link weight”, deep linking into earlier posts and previous internal pages. All the points are rather self-explanatory except point 2 where I do have some problem understand.

Having been involved with internet for over 9 years, online terminologies may appear as second nature to Darin, but for someone like me whose work does not involve IT or internet, it is not as easy as it seems.

In point 2, Darin advised to “give each page a unique META DESCRIPTION”. I don’t know about you, but I do not know what a meta description or meta tag is. Are these two terms similar? And how does one give “meta description” to a page? I would also like to know how giving a meta description will help the blog to escape the supplemental sandbox.

Perhaps Drain’s articles are meant to help those who are already well-versed or at least understood some basic terminologies of SEO. Otherwise, for newbie like me, I will appreciate if Darin can come down to our “level” to touch base with us.

Darin is currently running a free Nintendo Wii promotion, to enter, just write a post about the most valuable information you have learned from his blog and also mention about the contest. In return, Darin will link back to you with your preferred anchor text (except Search Marketing). It’s a pity he did not clearly indicate the contest closing date as well as how the winner will be selected.

Contest Aftermath

All good thing must come to an end, it’s official folks, my first blog contest had run its course and is now officially CLOSED! I want to thank all who entered the contest, it had been a fun journey reading all those insightful reviews. I hope it has been fun for you too. I also want to thank my fellow blogging friends who had helped to spread the word of this contest in one way or another.

Thanks to David of PureBlogging for giving it a shout-out and also Walt of Blog-Contests for featuring it on his blog. Special thanks also goes out to Kumiko for making a case study of my contest, benchmarking it against some industry standards, and also John of disassociated.com for writing what is by far the most comprehensive review. Although his post had met and exceeded the contest requirements, John had graciously requested NOT to be entered into the contest for fear of possible conflict of interest as I’ve earlier entered his contest. John's gesture is much appreciated and his request is respected.

Thank you guys!

Contest Stats
The take up rate for my contest has been far from satisfactory; it was way below my target of at least 30 entries. I thought I had an easily marketable concept using the 7/7/7 theme that will attract huge number of entries, but I will put both hands up and admit the contest a failure as far as the number of entry submissions are concern.

For the contest promotion, I submitted it to the various blogs that specializes in listing blog contest. Unfortunately, not all help to spread the word. I’ve also sent out close to 100 personal invitations to friends to support my contest, less than 10% took up the invite.

So what are the total numbers of entries received? Well, let’s just say I had offered a total of 7 cash prizes for the contest and those entries received are guaranteed a prize each!

So what happen?
What had caused this catastrophic outcome and what lessons have I learn from it? It will be convenient to just point the finger for the low take up rate at the difficulty level of the contest being set too high. I’ve seen and participated in other contests which are rather similar in nature, if not tougher than mine, which were well received.

Could it be the prizes offered are not attractive enough?
How could it be? One stands to win $77 for writing a 200 words review, isn’t it good money for a 30mins(max) job? I deduced that if I can order a paid Review from Kumiko’s popoular blog with huge reader base, for a mere $70, my offered top cash prize of $77 is more than attractive.

Furthermore, I’m offering 6 extra smaller cash prizes to increase the odds of contestant winning something and not leaving the party empty-handed. It is important to note that some bloggers do sponsored post for only $6 each.

Observations
On hindsight, the below are observations I gathered which are possible causes for the eventual failings of my contest:

- Curse of the subdomain.
It’s a creditability issue and people might not take blogspot blogs seriously. They may find no value to participate or even to be associated with a blogspot blog.

- Too much work required.
Writing review and posting screenshot of RSS subscription may have turned people off. Bloggers are a lazy bunch and they want easy-to-enter contest by just leaving a comment. I noticed such easy contest can attract big number of entries, like 300 to 400! And such contests usually offer crap prizes like USB cooler which no one really wants and eventually gets regifted several rounds. What are your odds of winning something not useful?

- Contest fatigue.
July was a unique month where I noticed many contests being launched. It was a competitive “market” and contest was easily buried by newer ones offering big prizes like iPod, Wii, Xbox360, iPhone etc. being launched every other day.

Summary
All in all, I must say it was a jolly good experience holding my first blog contest. It wasn’t a roaring success which I’ve hoped but I don’t want to take credit away from those who supported. I’ve no regret whatsoever and I want to empathize, I am very happy to be giving away the prizes and hope the cash would come in handy for the winners!

Alright, after rambling like forever and keeping you guys in suspense, who is the winner of the top prize of $77? For that, I'm sorry you'll have to wait a while longer. I promise the results will be posted during the coming weekend.

Stay tune!

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