LinkMoney.org

Archive for the ‘contest’ Category

Well after burning the midnight oil until about 6am today we finally finished the tally and selected the three winners of the first ever Link Money Contest.

I entered all contestants in a database and assigned each person a contestant number, then as they performed additional tasks I kept a running tally of the points count.  When the contest closed there was a total of 713 points spread out among all of the contestants.

Great care was taken to be sure that all points were credited to each contestant and then the final drawing was totally selected by chance by using Random.org to generate three different numbers for all of the points.

So now we will announce who the three winners were…

But first a word from our sponsors.
I want to thank each and every contestant who put a lot of effort into all the jumping through hoops that some cockamamie guy dreamed up, gee I wonder who that could be..?

I really want to thank some very special online internet marketing friends that stepped up when the contest was first announced and from the goodness of their heart freely donated some very nice prizes with no strings attached.

Mark Mason of Mason World http://www.masonworld.com/ donated two copies each of NicheAdsenseThemes, FirstEbookNow, and NicheNav, which will go to the first and second place winners.

J.T. Pratt of http://www.jtpratt.com/ donated three copies of his ebay plugin for WordPress, WP Easy Bay,  One of those will go to each of the three winners.  He also donated 2 hours of consulting as a WordPress Consultant value), which can be used for upgrades, security, SEO, theme work, etc.”   This will be one hour each to first and second place winner.

Then LinkMoney.org donated a paid copy of GoogleSniper and $200 cash to the First Place winner, which will be in addition to the above mentioned prizes..

$100 cash and prizes mentioned above go to the Second Place winner.

$50 cash and the Ebay plugin to the Third Place winner.

And the winners are…

First place goes to: Contestant “krissy knox”

Second Place goes to: Contestant “Eva”

Third Place goes to: Contestant “glf”

Notifications have been made by email.

Thanks again to everyone involved and when we do another Link Money Contest it will be easier all the way around.

Happy Holidays everyone.
Rich Hill

http://LinkMoney.org

Alexa is owned by Amazon and they use a rating system that estimates all website traffic.  When a site is brand spanking new it starts out with an Alexa rank of several million.  In this ranking system the smaller the number that your website receives is better.

Your site will not start to show up in the Alexa charts until your site is in the top 100,000.  To tell the truth I never worried much about it and I never have worried much about the Google Page Rank score either.  In GPR your site is rated as a number from 0 to 9, or possibly 10 not sure about that.

Now lately I have had two different companies contact me out of the blue to ask for my advertising rate for inclusion of either banner ads or a simple anchor text ad.  This is about the only time that the Alexa score really counts because advertisers that are in the know do look at the Alexa number to decide whether or not to spend part of their marketing budget with you or say John Chow.  I do have a feeling that my ad rate is slightly below John Chow’s but I want to change that.

So here’s the deal.  On the next post after this one I am going to start a contest that will run until the end of the year.  My goal is to see my Alexa ranking drop to below 100,000 and so I not only will have bragging rights but that my daily chart will look real cool in the sidebar, and hopefully the advertisers will be enticed to spend a buck or two with me.

Here is where you readers come in.  I will have multiple ways that you can enter the contest.  There will be three good prizes.  “Good Prizes!” All entrants will have an equal chance in the final drawing and you will be able to increase your chances through performing multiple tasks to help this site get some recognition.  More about all of this and I will have full details in the next post.

The following are some things that I have been doing on my own to help this site and you will no doubt want to do some of these for your own site, and I encourage it.  Some of these things will be used as entrant’s requirements to enter the forthcoming contest here on Linkmoney.org.

Here is what I have been doing lately in the case of trying to improve Alexa score.
First of all it is not an exact science but if you ever intend to sell paid advertisements it is reported that advertisers look at this score as part of their evaluation of your website. Needles to say a lower Alexa score is better.

Alexa tells us that the score is developed from an average of your past three month’s traffic stream. However what some people do not realize is that it is not a fair and accurate measurement because the only traffic that counts in Alexa’s eyes is from browsers that have the Alexa toolbar installed on them.

So a deep meaning website that might be chock full of good socially beneficial content, but might be more apt to be visited by readers that do not have the toolbar installed, do not get the votes. Primarily the sites that gain the most benefit from this system would be the make money online, or Blogs about blogging, domaining, coding, and so on. In other words the majority of visitors would be propeller heads and might more likely be apt to have the Alexa toolbar installed.

So what I recommend is that everyone go to Alexa right now and install the toolbar in your browser, and then for what it is worth and I do believe it counts, set your own website up to be your computer start up homepage. That way every time you turn your computer on or page out and revisit your own site is a vote.   (In the past two days I have seen my own score drop 6,000 points and I believe it is only from performing this feature.)

Another thing I do is to grab the Alexa sidebar widget that shows your Alexa score and the number of back links that Alexa has discovered for your site. (See mine down at the lower right hand side.)  So, just slide a text box widget over to your sidebar, and insert the code and you are good to go. I also add a text title that tells the reader to “Click for Alexa Vote” (or something like it.) That way even if a reader does not have the Alexa toolbar, and they click on the widget banner, then that is a vote for your site also.

One other thing that I have just started to do is to use the Alexa site voting feature, and I give an Alexa five star rating to friends and they return the favor. So anyone that will go to Alexa and give this site a five star rating will be immediately entered into the forthcoming contest, “and” I also will return the favor, just let me know when you have posted the five star rating for Linkmoney.org.

I have not found anyone that is willing to say for sure that it helps in the overall Alexa scoring, but the way I look at it is that I suspect it does, and if not it can’t hurt anything. So it is election season, let’s all vote each other a nice easy government job. LOL

Cheers.
Rich Hill

Ps: This site uses the CommentLUV widget and also the Top Commentator widget.  So the top commentators will receive a do follow backlink.  Do not spam it or you will be deleted obliterated, and an Exocet missile will home in on your signal generating device.  Please leave as many nice comments as you want at any time, not just for a contest event.

Happy Halloween.

Update on value of increasing Alexa ranking. If you are in to List Building you will want to check out Jack Humphreys instructions on how to get more subscribers to your list.

My how the times have changed!

The popular Internet social/micro message blogging platform, Twitter.com, gives you 140 characters to get the job done.  This creeps some long winded (a-hem) people out, and to others it is the all saving grace.

Make your point in 140 key strokes or die.

So along comes TinyURL.com a neat service that takes any length url line that you can type into it, or copy and paste into it, and then reduces it to just a few characters, say about 10 to 14 or so.  This is a really nice feature. It is free, and there is an add-on for most browsers, and it allows you to include a link in your Twitter message that is much shorter that the original and then you can type more BS in your message box.

Now along comes a new company, XR.com.  That is their real url, XR.com.  See where we are going here?

This company XR is already a leg up on the competition because their name is shorter, XR = 2, TinyURL = 7.

XR wins the “Mine is Shorter Than Yours Contest” ! -  (I bet you never thought you would see the day…)

What it boils down to is if a shorter url encrypted line is needed, then you should try XR.com.

Thanks to JohnChow.com for this great news, and John is running a contest right now, until Christmas that is sponsored by XR and you can win SIX THOUSAND BUCKS!  American Moolah!  Casherino!

The lucky winner, (wouldn’t it be nice if it was moi?) will receive $5,000 to go to their favorite charity, (like The Salvation Army,) and $1,000 US dollars to use for themselves in any way they want to.

Now that’s what I call a contest!

Here is a link to the contest post: http://xr.com/7vz

I’m Rich

NameCheap the west coast hosting company and domain registrar, is sponsoring an enormous contest on Twitter, starting tonight at Midnight Pacific time.

Every hour there will be a new trivia question asked from now until Christmas. You should all have at least some kind of decent chance to win some of their $17,000 dollars worth of giveaway prizes.

NameCheap is well known for having various types of hosting packages to fit any budget. Now you can possibly win free domain names, or free hosting packages in this Twitter contest.

If you have not yet registered for Twitter yet, and you two people know who you are, then you should get right over there and get a Twitter @[handle]. Say what you need to say in 140 characters or less and twit, tweet away.

You can follow me on Twitter by going to Twitter.com/linkmoneydotorg and clicking on the “follow” button.

Oh yes, you will also have to follow Twitter.com/NameCheap to get in the trivia contest.

Do me a favor please, and Subscribe to this blog, and leave a comment.
Thanks.
Rich

Garry Conn is running a contest sponsored by PepperJam Networks.

The first twenty five bloggers that set up a PepperJam Store on any website of your choice, wins $10.00 and gets a chance at $100 prize for most creative.

Check it out.

Wow! Miguel Alvarez’ MarketingFactor website is holding a contest called the Blog Boost and is giving away several thousand dollars worth of prizes to four lucky individuals on September 20th.

You should visit the site and all you have to do to be in the drawing is to sign up to the MarketingFactor email newsletter, which is a great idea anyway because Miguel knows what he is talking about.

There are other very simple ways to add more chances to win by earing extra drawing tickets, such as to Friend Miguel on FaceBook, follow him on Twitter, etc.

You will gain a lot of very good information that you can use to optimize your site and all types of Internet Marketing tips when you read Miguel’s Blog at MarketingFactor.

Win an I-Pod Touch or a copy of Unique Blog Design’s “Citrus” professional WordPress theme.

This team of coders has been hammering out some extremely useful themes for a year now.  I have been using one of them on another Blog with great satisfaction, and the themes are VERY search engine friendly and have neat ways to monetize your site.

Check out UBD, MOSTLY for their quality themes, and oh yes the contest is cool too!

Hey you can’t win the Lottery if you don’t play!

Oh by the way, it is free to enter the contest.

I’m Rich !