Well, it turns out that in the final week of the Search Marketing Scholarship Contest, I was able to squeak out a win with my article titled The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing. It’s a pretty big honor to win the week that I entered since not only were there the most entries, but it was the strictest competition with some great entries.
At this point, the winners of each of the four weeks now go in front of a panel of industry judges to decide which article will win the overall contest.
Andy’s done a great writeup titled The Anatomy of a Search Marketing Scholarship Contest. In it, he outlines the competition each week, various tactics used to garner traffic to each article, and the total uniqe visitors and percentages of the top referring sources. It’s a pretty great insight into the various marketing techniques that a lot of marketers are using to gain traffic to their sites, not to mention a great real-world example of the power of well-written headlines.
On top of the marketing lessons learned form the articles, you should definitely give it a read for ideas on how you can further engage your marketplace through a contest like this, or something similar. The breakdown of how he’s gone about the contest and how it played out week by week is certainly valuable from any sort of Social Media perspective.