Contests are fun for both the contest holder and their contestants. Winning even the smallest of prizes can be very rewarding in the form of recognition, exposure, traffic, backlinks and new friends. The contest holder wins big with the same benefits. This week I found another way to participate in online contests that’s just as rewarding. It’s sponsoring a contest.

I recently decided to sponsor a contest being held by one of my online friends. It’s been about a week and I’ve already made several new friends and have received several backlinks from others posting about the contest.

“Thou Shall Win” Contest

The site that helped me realize that sponsoring a contest can make you a winner too is ThouShallBlog.com - Blogging Tips for Beginners by Yan Susanto. Yan is running a contest through August called ‘Thou Shall Win Contest‘. Our site, Extreme Ezine, is one of the many sponsors and I’m glad to see how fast the contest is building momentum. That’s due to Yan’s incredible networking skills.

Over $2500 worth of prizes are up for grabs and entering is easy. Get the details here: Thou Shall Win Contest

The Grand Prize

A ticket to the “Event Apart” which is held in the USA. The Ticket is worth about $1,000.00 and will be good for any 2008 event.

Courtesy of PB from Piss Biscuit

Winner #1

1. 12-month private membership at LifeFoc.us, courtesy of FullTiltBlogging.com, the brain child of Aaron Abber (Worth $324)
2. 30-min live blog consultation by Rockfuse.com (Worth $30)
3. 1 month 468×60 Ad Spot from Tech Suave (Worth $30)
4. 3,000 Entrecard Credits from Brian Hawkins @ Extreme Ezine

Winner #2

1. $500.00 dollar credit for Blog Re-design courtesy of Piss Biscuit.
2. 30-min live blog consultation by Rockfuse.com (Worth $30)
3. 1 month 125×125 Ad Spot from Piss Biscuit (Worth $40)
4. 2000 Entrecard Credits from Brian Hawkins @ Extreme Ezine

Winner #3

1. Blog Review courtesy of Piss Biscuit (Worth $100)
2. 60-min blog consultation by The Net Fool (Worth $60)
3. 1 month 125×125 Ad Spot from Etienne Teo (Worth $25)
4. 2,000 Entrecard Credits from Jay @ DatMoney.com

Winner #4

1. 1 Copy of Premium Theme from WooThemes by Piss Biscuit (Worth $100)
2. 1 Custom Banner Design (468×60 or 125×125) from DatMoney.com
3. 1 month 125×125 Ad Spot from Yours Truly, Blog for Beginners (Worth $20)
4. 2,000 Entrecard Credits from Jay @ iBlogtoBlog.com

Winner #5

1. 1 Copy of the Revolution WordPress Theme from Brian Gardner (Worth $80)
2. 1 month 125×125 Ad Spot from Etienne Teo (Worth $25)
3. 1 month sidewide PR3 link on both DatMoney.com & iBlogtoBlog.com
4. 1,000 Entrecard Credits from Michael Aulia’s Tech Blog

Bonus Prize

The contestant with the highest no. of points (both maximum and referral points) will win 3,000 Entrecard Credits from WP Beginners

Get more details here: Thou Shall Win Contest

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I have yet to see a legitimate ad blaster that works and is legal? You can find them to blast emails, Yahoo Groups, MySpace etc. and they are junk. Just like Free For All lists, they give legitimate advertising methods a bad name.

Guess who owns MasterAdBlaster.com? Yep, I do. I was so excited when I first purchased that domain. I already had the perfect product to promote there. I had purchased the resell rights to an ad blaster from a very respected marketer. It was the latest (Back in Nov. of 2005) Automatic AdBlasting Software that sent your ad automatically and instantly to over 1000 Advertising Networks and 2,500,000+ Websites and Engines across the net, day after day, throughout the year! Bla Bla Bla

The site was perfect. Great graphics and structure. Enticing ad copy that promised:

“Have Your Ad Blasted To 2,500,000+ Sites Every Day
Automatically Using The Worlds Most Astonishing
“Set And Forget” Technology !”

and

Get 5000 Hits To Your Website Per Hour!

I was nieve back then. I used the blaster everyday. I promoted my new site and sold a few copies. Then the inevitable came. I began receiving complaints and refund requests. You know why? Because I hadn’t bothered testing it. I faithfully submitted my ads daily just assuming they were being delivered just as the software displayed after the submission process. So I finally wised up and used a tracker. I tested many sites for weeks. Hundreds of ads going to what was supposed to be millions of sites and not one single click. I was so embarrassed.

Embarrassed but not defeated, I started looking for a replacement that worked. I tried several other email blasters that didn’t work at all. I found a nice Yahoo Groups mailer that showed promise but didn’t pan out. The latest was a piece of junk MySpace mailer that was being promoted everywhere last year. Again, zero clicks!

The Bottom Line

Here’s the bottom line - Are the ads even delivered? I doubt it but even if they are, the proofs in the pudding as to the results.

Are there any legitimate Blasters? I have yet to find one and I really really tried. Hey, I wanted MasterAdBlaster to be a success! Do you have one that is legal, ethical and actually works? Give it to me and I’ll test it but I’m done buying them. Don’t even bother unless every single person that receives the blast has opted-in to get the ads. If you can’t prove that then it’s unethical as far as I’m concerned.

Why they’ll never work - A blaster won’t work even if the ad actually gets delivered unless someone can resolve one huge problem. That problem has to do with targeted ads going to potential customers that want to see what you have to offer. It’s our greed and laziness that fuels the development of these fraudulent programs. Now if it was an opt-in membership based blaster then I would be of a different opinion but then it would be called a safelist

That’s Right I Said It,
Brian Hawkins

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Back in February I wrote a piece on why WordPress is a better choice than Blogger for setting up your own blog. That post is no longer available but it was basically my opinion that WordPress’ options and features allowed for much more control over your site making it a better choice over Blogger. Now it looks like there’s another reason to lean toward WordPress for your blog format - security risks…

I’m sure that no one is surprised that Web 2.0 isn’t only gaining popularity with good Google fearing web users, hackers are loving it too. Sophos.com just released their threat report for July 2008. The report highlights some interesting yet not surprising facts. Website infection rate is up 300% times faster than last year with Google’s Blogger being the number one host of malware.

“Sophos has identified that the number one host for malware on the web is Blogger (Blogspot.com), which allows computer users to make their own websites easily at no charge. Hackers both set up malicious blogs on the service, and inject dangerous web links and content into innocent blogs in the form of comments. Blogspot.com accounts for 2 percent of all of the world’s malware hosted on the web.”

source

To be fair WordPress may be in the news next. The fact is Blogger hosts 2% of malware on the web but that’s still a small fraction of the low lives out there. Blogs and Web 2.0 sites and other legitimate websites are at an increased risk due to their increased popularity.

I recommend that you always know what you’re clicking on before you hit the mouse button and keep your computer up to date with quality virus, malware and spyware protection. In my opinion WordPress is still a better choice than Blogger.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

This post is going to be helpful mainly to those fairly new to blogging. Can you remember the first time you heard the word ‘Blog’? I bet it wasn’t that long ago. I can remember posting on my forum about this new thing called a Blog asking if anyone know what it was. Shortly after that I was running my own Blog on Blogger.

Later I moved my two Blogs from Blogger, Google’s free Blog hosting network to my own domains using WordPress. That gave me three WordPress Blogs. Just six weeks later I had ten! When I had thirteen blogs I went to the opposite extreme and pulled all but three (This post was rescued from one of them). Blogging is here to stay. It’s just too contagious, too addicting. I converted ExtremeEzine.com to Blog format even though I knew we would be starting over in a sense as far as the search engines were concerned. We built ExtremeEzine.com to a page rank of 05/10 on our main page. Now that the URL of the main page has changed we’re down to a 02/10.

So why the change? It sounds crazy I know but there really is a method to my madness. There are many reasons to change over to Blog format and I want to share my thoughts on the subject.

Read the rest of this entry »