- Four weekly winners - this allowed me to give more than one person a chance to win. By using "unique views" as the method to win, it ensured those that were serious about the contest, would have to do more than just write a great article. The winner would have to understand that simply providing the deliverable is not the end story for any marketer, you actually need to get exposure and traffic.

- One final winner - just in case one of the entrants managed to bombard their article with lots of unique visitors, I didn't want to fully rely on this metric for selecting the final winner. On that basis, I reached out to some great friends and asked them if they would consider being a judge. The panel of judges would select the final winner based purely upon content and merit.

- The finalists from weeks 1, 2 and 3, did well not to wait until the final week. Indeed, week 2 winner, Ryan Bell, had the 25th overall most popular article, but entered on a week when competition was lower.

- Week 4 entrants had the benefit of seeing how the contest had played out, and what articles had faired best. They were much more creative in their traffic driving efforts, using sites such as battellemedia.com, dutchcowboys.nl, myspace.com and their own business and personal web sites.

- Great titles certainly help. While practical, keyword-filled titles were the most common, intriguing, interesting titles were one effective way to attract visitors. We won't quickly forget, "Free Beer Inside", "Most SEOs are Virgins" and "The SEO Article You Shouldn't Read".

- Google Analytics did a good job in weeding out efforts to inflate visitor count. Only a couple of entries had a high ratio of Page Views compared to Unique Views.

- Those articles that didn't fair well, were the ones that ended-up having Google has the highest traffic referrer. This suggests that maybe entrants hoped their title and content would rank well. With just a week to drive traffic, those who tried to get traffic from more varied sources, tended to fair better.

- Despite the contest rules stipulating one entry per person - and despite my best efforts to monitor - one entrant managed to submit 3 different entries across the 4 weeks. Give them credit for trying.

- MarketingPilgrim.com was also briefly banned by Digg, due to one or more entrants trying to "Digg" their entry using multiple accounts. Unfortunately, they used the same IP each time!!