Lol, its extremely ambitious to think anyone is going to buy a report by the winner. For a start everything is out in the open, print out the winners source code and backlink profile, theres your report for free. If you have an seo contest where the prize is $30k then yes I'd like to hear what the winner has to say, but a competition for people to learn in seo from, largely competed by beginners, is not worth paying a cent for a report from. I think you just need to treat it as a fun contest for people, not try and make money on it like that or its destined for failure.
I agree, lets hope all participants atleast rank in the first page in google. or maybe i am just underestimating people. p.s for a contest with 30k, i would use the keyword "google" and see who can rank better
Also i suggest we have investment caps. like we dont want some rich webmaster to buy high cost pr website backlinks. that way, the person who can invest the most would definitely have an edge.
How exactly would that be detected? What constitutes 'paid' backlinks? Just paypal transactions, or is giving a guy a Christmas ham for a link disallowed?
Exactly, how can you police it? I don't think you need to worry about setting spending limits, given the prize is small. There isn't any incentive for someone to spend $1k on it to win. I think you need to forget all the rules, apart from the easily enforcable one - no domains registered before x date.
Amen. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Some of these rules might sound good, but they just put a fly in the ointment. Agreed, no need to put spending limits or a paid links ban. Let Google sort 'em out.
Hi guys yeh with regards to paid links theres no way of monitoring it so pretty much everything goes im also thinking about adding 1 more rule NO keywords from the keyphrase to be used in the domain if you have the exact phrase match as your domain it gives you a huge advantage what do you guys think about this? Sign up page is here http://www.vipey.com/seo-competition/ that will only subscribe to the seo competition but not my blog
Yes, it confers an advantage. However, I think this is all part of the contest. Besides, the number of extensions available x the number of suffixes/prefixes you could add to an exact match means the domains available with all keywords are effectively limitless. Some will get an exact match, everybody else can have keywordkeywordkeyword1.com or keyword-keyword-keyword.we (.we = wierd extension). Just my thoughts.
I think this rule (though I added it myself ) depends on whether we are going after a competitive keyphrase from which we can make money afterwards or "mashed potato pie with ice cream".
How about "space aliens saved me from foreclosure" or something like that, then you have a weird phrase with not a lot of competition, but you could still get a decent keyword in there.
no the phrase will be something that is completely made up and one that has little competition as i think the competition will probably be entered by people wanting to learn seo and beginners. this also makes it as fair as possible. on a separate note anyone who is interested in sponsoring the contest please PM me or contact me here http://www.vipey.com/contact-us/ and we can discuss it further
hi, no still talking to a few people but they want numbers of how many people are entering etc... so far only 5 people have signed up here http://www.vipey.com/seo-competition/ need alot more to make this workable so spread the word, write blog posts etc.. and try other forums
For people waiting to see what the prizes etc are before they enter, I would reconsider. Nobody is going to sponsor anything with 5 entrants, so get your entries in and then the prizes are more likely to be something worthwhile.
yeh well said mate, the more entries we get the better the prizes will be, If i get entries at least then there will be some better prizes. if you have a blog just do a quick post giving this thread and the signup page and see what interest there is I will personally pay $10 to the blogger who send the most traffic to that page and comes up with a creative blogpost on their blog
I've done a liitle promotion here and there but people seem to be more interested in the costs of domain and hosting.
yeh thats the problem# i thought they wopuld be alot more interest that this had a few suggestions to setup a seperate site for this but i dont really have the time for all that, ive enough people had shown an interest then yeh i would where all these "number 1 in google" guys?? show us your for real