Blogging Idol Contest: Accepting Sponsors and Applications!

You probably saw the competition between John Chow and Shoemoney, where both bloggers dueled for one month to see who could gain more RSS subscribers on that time frame. It was a fan event for the readers and fans of both bloggers, and it also was positive for the bloggers themselves because they ended up with a huge boost in the number of subscribers.

When the competition was over I thought that it would be cool to launch a similar one but at a larger scale, and that is when I started conceptualizing the idea of the Blogging Idol.

The idea

Basically I want to create a competition where any blogger with 1000 subscribers or less can enter. People can also create brand new blogs just for the competition. Those bloggers will then compete for one month, and we will track the initial and the final number of subscribers (as reported from Feedburner), and the blogger who manages to gain the largest number of new subscribers in that period will be declared the Blogging Idol, and will win the money prize.

Should the contest become successful in the future editions we can also have variations. Instead of RSS subscribers we could make the competition around raw traffic or income generated, for example. The first one will be focused on RSS subscribers though.

The 1000 subscribers cap will be used to exclude larger blogs and pro bloggers. It would not be fair after all if guys with brand new blogs were to compete with someone that already has 10,000. For the latter, adding hundreds of new subscribers in the course of one month is not a difficult task.

The objective of the contest is to give new bloggers an opportunity to compete with others and to prove their ability on blogging and online marketing. At the same time, it should also allow everyone to see what techniques and strategies will work, the ones that will not, with real examples behind everything.

Sponsors Welcome

I am planning to have one big final prize that will be awarded to the winner. Ideally it should be a cash prize, but products and services with high value (over $300) might be included.

I am talking with some companies that might sponsor the event already, but if you want to get involved just drop me an email via the contact form. You will get your company, product or service mentioned on at least 4 posts, and showcased in front of tens of thousands of eager bloggers.

Rules for the Competition

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.
6. If you have a blog with over 1000 RSS subscribers and will create a brand new one for the competition, you can’t use your established blog to promote the new one
7. All other strategies and techniques are allowed (guest articles, contests, give-aways, controversial articles, free eBooks), so you are free to get creative

Send your application

If you agree with the rules of the contest, just send me an email via the contact form with your name and the URL of the blog that you want to enter on the competition (it can be the URL of a non-existent blog if you are planning to create one).

Update: There is a new post about the contest. So far we have almost 80 contestants, and $1500 in prizes for the winner. You can read about it here.