Sh*t! I Nearly Forgot!

There is only about 48 hours left for qualification of my article to get into the Marketing Pilgrim’s final! If you haven’t been following along here is the skinny one what has been happening… I wrote an article with an example of how to use Social Media Leverage and entered it into the competition and then promptly got caught up in some other stuff like losing a week in a country town. The way to get into the finals is to drive as much unique traffic to the article and have them read it in its entirety, 2 minutes 30 seconds or more doing it. Easy hey?

While I am glad I have not resorted to blatant link swapping like another entrant, I have not done much more than link it in one forum and that was it. Poor effort on my behalf and even though I believe in content standing on its own two feet, I also know that reaching out to the more influential people in your network of friends and asking them to help out is probably a VERY sensible thing to do….do you hate asking favours like that? I know I do…weird.

I was reading an article about a study earlier in the week about women are MUCH less likely to put their creations out for public scrutiny on the internet.

It appears, “lack of perceived skill is holding women back from putting their creative content out there,” says Hargittai, going on other factors that may be responsible for the difference, while not measured in the study, “may relate to lack of confidence in the quality of one’s work

Yep “wah wah” I am using the gender card to explain my lack of cahonies in going out and promoting!

So my dear readers, please read the article, perform whatever wonderful social adulation you believe it deserves.

Here is the link again in case you missed it the first time

Sour Grapes?

I have an entry in the Marketing Pilgrim’s SEO Scholarshipcompetition. There are 30 other articles in that competition, and I have been slowly reading through them all. One of those articles struck me as being ultra popular because it has almost 3 times the amount of comments as my article.

“That’s interesting” I thought…

I will go take a look at the blog of the person who wrote this because they seem to have a large following and I want to see what I can learn from them. I was disappointed, however, to find that on the front page of the blog was a link-reciprocation article flat out asking for links to their entry in return for links on the blog.

Now the rules of the competition state
9. Any incidence of spam or “black hat” techniques will result in the disqualification of the entry. If in any doubt, ask yourself if you would apply the same techniques in a campaign for a company such as General Electric or Apple.

To me this blogger’s tactic doesn’t sound like something GE or Apple would be pleased to see their marketers would be doing. But maybe that is just me. It sure isn’t spam or absolute black hat, but its a pretty shitty way to earn links and traffic.

From my perspective it is not in the keeping of the spirit of the game.

Maybe it is just sour grapes from me….What do you think?