Search Marketing Scholarship Contest

The last four weeks of Marketing Pilgrims Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest has been lots of fun, and it was a great success.

Link: Search Engine Marketing Contest

When I put together the idea for a scholarship, I wanted to find a way to give back to an industry that has been very good to me and help find the next top talent – you could call it “SEM Idol“. I was fortunate enough to find some great sponsors, who contributed over $6,000 in prizes and a panel of judges who are arguably the best in the industry.

I wanted to give everyone who entered a fair chance, so I crafted the contest to have two components:

I expected to receive a steady flow of entries, but ended up being blown-away by the 48 entries received over the four weeks. The first week saw those, who realized the scholarship as a great opportunity, eagerly submit their entries.

Week 2 was the slowest week. We had just five entries, and the lowest unique views of all the weeks. Those that entered in week two found little competition.

In week 3, things picked-up again and we saw an increase in the intensity of entrants to drive traffic to their article. We saw more creative ways of driving traffic, with some even using PPC to bring traffic to their entry.

By the time we got to week 4, the heavy-hitters had arrived. No less than 6 of the 10 most viewed entries came from those submitted in week 4. The utilization of social networks became more apparent among week 4 entrants.

Everyone that entered the contest should be commended for their marvelous effort. I was extremely impressed with the overall quality and the topics were varied, as were the writing styles. The four finalists (w1, w2, w3, w4) did a superb job in beating out the competition and they now go before our expert judges, with our final scholarship winner being announced on Friday November 10th.

At lot of readers, and most entrants, have asked about how each entry faired in the contest. Instead of just sharing the unique views for each entry, I decided to get a little “mozzie” and share some interesting info about each entry.

In the table below, you’ll see not only the unique views, but total page views, percentage of direct-navigation traffic, and the top 3 referral sources for each entry. There are also links to the web page of choice for each entrant – linked by their name – so you can check out the person behind the article. If you’re looking to hire an SEO, you should certainly consider these guys.

So, here’s the data:

As you can see, I’ve ordered the entries based upon “unique views”, so you can see how strong each article was compared to the rest. The four weekly winners have been highlighted in yellow.

Summary and observations.

Thanks again to all who entered, all who sponsored prizes, our judges and our readers. Stay tuned for the announcement of the final winner!

I’m definitely open to doing another scholarship contest in 2007. I’d certainly love to hear ideas about how to structure the next contest and what prizes would get you to enter.

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Tag: SEM Scholarship

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