AMA Christmas Bonanza… Holy Free Trial & Memberhip giveaway
Hey All,
If You Are Not A FREE Member Yet
Click Here To Register a FREE Account on AMA
The top 10 answers below will get a free AMA account for life.
All you need to do is be creative and put a good competition & competition rating example forward on what would be a really nice competition you would have fun being part off.
Well coming into December and having an absolutely stellar 2009 together we wanted to give you a little bit of a bonus to help some of the free members here see the power of AMA and get some early christmas results for those niche sites of yours.
This will happen next week on Tuesday I have yet to set a time.
What will you do with this free article submission period?
Do you think we should do a mini competition?
If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
Who can get the fastest results through AMA?
What do you think?
Post your comments below, the top 10 answers in creativity & depth will win a LIFETIME AMA membership. 
Marc Lindsay
Post
November 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Hey Marc,
Great idea mate.
How about something like this:
1) Everyone become an affiliate for AMA and start with a new domain. (newly registered and no existing traffic)
2) Everyone generate traffic to the website/blog for whatever keywords they feel they can rank for best and generate as much traffic as possible in a specific amount of time. Obviously the more time people put in, the better results they will get.
3) You look at sales generated and who makes the best effort and reward accordingly.
It’s a win/win
Alternatively, instead of getting everyone to promote AMA, you could choose a random niche each month (for example bird feeding) and let the battle commence
Cheers dude,
Ant
November 27th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Competition?
A funny thing to do could be an SEO contest, with the targeted expression “a megalomaniac true kit in tort” which is an anagram of Article Marketing Automation
November 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
What will you do with this free article submission period?
Submit as many article as I can to maximize the potential of AMA.
Do you think we should do a mini competition? If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
Starting a competition is a good idea, so go for it. Competition ideas, given in a specific period, include:
Who has the highest spin rate (the most variation) of articles?
Who has the highest accept rate of articles (rate higher than 80%, for example)?
Who has the lowest reject rate of articles (similar as above)?
Hope it helps.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Hi,
I think one of the best things to do in this holiday period is to promote product names including model numbers.
It’s near the end of November, so we haven’t got long to rank for keywords with a lot of competition.
Therefore, check the hottest products available at the moment.
Here’s an example technique to research product names within the UK.
Go here:
http://uk.shopping.com/top_searches
(Hope links are allowed in this post!)
To continue the example, I went to the “heaters” section, then clicked the “DeLonghi G011230RTW”.
Type in the above phrase into Google. Competition broad match is only 26,000! Exact match: 20,000!
Now - you can affiliate yourself with shopping.com:
https://partners.shopping.com/locale.svc?locale=en_GB&page=Home
That particular product name can be ranked in the top 10 within a couple of weeks. Use a wordpress site, and use the product name as the page or post title with the “all in one SEO” plugin.
And trust me - people will search for that phrase, and using AMA will give you top natural rankings very quick.
Select the most popular products in that niche (you could use the same research for as many products as you want), and you could build out a killer niche site.
You can use many different tools to add affiliate products to wordpress, and actually, my favourite is PHPbay, to add ebay auction listings.
I prefer it because they pay you like adsense now - you don’t even have to make a sale, just get the clicks. Also, you can find ANYTHING in any niche on ebay.
Sign up with eBay partner network ASAP
Oh, and don’t forget to add at least a couple hundred words of unique content to each product page, adding the target keyword, plus other related keywords to theme it out a little.
Don’t like writing content? My method: buy some related plr, hire someone on digital point to rewrite it for $1 a pop (it’s now unique), and ask them to insert related keywords.
Pay em’ another dollar to do a second rewrite and combine it in spinnable format to submit to AMA. Add three keywords to the article that point to the product page with relevant anchortext keyword.
You’ll get at least 5 - 7 (x3) links per day from that one article submission.
Even if you only get 5 hits per day per product name - add 50 products in that niche and you got some serious holiday traffic.
Hint: forget my “heaters” idea, and concentrate on popular gifts. What will people be buying for their mums, dads, siblings.
Hint 2: Forget toys for now - too much competition. Think outside the box…
Hope this has been helpful.
Let me know if you want more info - if I’ve been to vague.
Thanks for reading!
November 27th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Who can get the best results using AMA sounds like a great idea.
Here are some suggested guidelines:
1. Register a new domain (this would be to make it fair and ensure that everyone starts from the same place). Though niche markets are different, with different levels of competition, this is one way to at least level the playing field. Whois can provide data on when a domain was registered.
2. The market (or niche) we pick should have X number of competing pages already established. This way, no one picks a keyword that’s too hard or too easy to rank for.
3. You can ONLY use AMA to get backlinks to your site. Nothing else. No twitter, no blog commenting, no pingback/trackbacks (unless the AMA sites ping and trackback your site).
4. Whoever gets the best serps results in X number of days wins.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:24 am
I think a competition is a great idea, especially for those who have never witnessed the power of AMA in action.
In terms of a competition, it needs to be something that shows off how powerful AMA is while also allowing for fun. My idea is to see who can submit the most articles and have the fewest number rejected. The challenge wouldn’t be spitting out the most articles, but creating valuable content to distribute around the AMA network. Obviously, a single unspun article would not be as valuable as an article that was diverse and able to be distributed to a multitude of websites. There could be points awarded to the number of successfully approved articles distributed as well as points deducted for having articles rejected. There would also be points awarded to website owners for approving the available articles. The winners would be those with the highest total of points.for submission/approval.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:26 am
I have been involved in affiliate marketing since around July 1. Started with AMAutomation a few weeks ago and am a member of The Outsource Method. I am grateful for the opportunity to win a free lifetime membership to AMA.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:26 am
What a great idea, you guys are something else!
Maybe a competition to see who can submit 1 article every day from the 1st of December to christmas? That would be a very practical way of demonstrating just how powerful the system is.
I will try and think of some more
November 27th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I go with Ant’s random niche battle idea combined with the concept of it being a brand new domain.
-Give people a list of say 20 keyword phrases.
-Award prizes based on points for high rankings and total search engine traffic.
-Skip total traffic because it is too easily manipulated.
-Maybe throw in something involving unique users.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:31 am
great idea Marc, here are my thoughts
> What will you do with this free article submission period?
Take advantage of it as much as possible without spamming the system
> Do you think we should do a mini competition?
Competition can be broken into 2 segments “Site owners/ Linnk builders”
Site owners will create domains Blogs during the competition and receive articles from AMA
Link builders will build links to their BLOGS (that way you can more accurately measure where the links come from).
Blogs will target link building keywords and promote AMA
The groups will be given a pre-made list of keywords that contain medium/low competition keywords which are relevant to link building. This will ensure an even greater level of competitive spirit since people may see fellow AMA competitors on the same SERP
> If so what should the reward be and what should the
> competition be?
Site owners performance will be measured by the amount of traffic that they generate using AMA articles.
Link builders performance will be measured by the amount of traffic and AMA sales subscriptions that they generate during the period.
Having multiple “Medals” will ensure a greater participation, not all participants will expect to win the first place, may create Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper and Iron Medals prizes. To make it even more appealing there can also be bonus prizes for participants that demonstrate good effort
I think free memberships to AMA would be a great award, You may consider giving away Your New outsourcing guide (outsourcemethod.com) that you have, PGB, PLR pro etc..
During the competition emails will be sent to participants that explain the progress and who’s leading and who the up coming stars of the comopetition are.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Whoops, sorry if I didn’t fully answer the questions from the actual blog post. Let me try better:
What will you do with this free article submission period?
Use it to rank low competition keywords that are definitely getting searched (They won’t show up in kw tools for a few months, so we need to rely on the merchants data). Make money from affiliate outgoing links.
—
Do you think we should do a mini competition?
Not sure how you could regulate it unless everyone does the same thing.
If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
—
Who can get the fastest results through AMA?
Sounds like a good idea to me. How about who can get the most traffic from using AMA alone?
November 27th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Very generous idea guys, in keeping with this and the Christmas spirit why not adopt a charity and run a competition where members can use one of their article submissions to write an article about your charity and raise awareness.
The winner would be the one who drove the most traffic to the site.
The traffic could be tracked by issuing a simple affiliate style link
The person who sent the most traffic to the charity page should get a free membership
November 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Ok, how about this.. you pick a keyword phrase and see who can get their own page ranking best for that phrase? Hmm.. I suppose that’s a bit boring though and will be easy for people with established sites..
Maybe if you create a brand new site and then free members get to submit articles promoting your site, and the person that gets the most articles (linking to your site) indexed in google gets the site as a reward?
Ok, I’m still thinking..
November 27th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Happy holidays!
Love the crowd-sourcing for ideas. Here are my two cents:
The most important asset to AMA is its network site owners. Without these publishers, there wouldn’t be anywhere to syndicate content, and then people wouldn’t pay to submit their content to the network.
Fortunately it is a pretty robust network, but some niches are better served than others. So here is the contest idea:
1. Identify the niches with the lowest coverage (look at your stats and pick out the categories with decent volume and the lowest ratio of blogs-to-articles-submitted, or some similar statistic).
2. Run a contest to add sites to that particular niche. Everyone who wants to participate will set up a new blog within that niche category. Then, they will use any whitehat marketing/promotion techniques they know (including AMA) to drive traffic to the site and gain exposure. The most successful people to do so will be rewarded.
You can repeat this for each niche so everyone gets a chance to participate - and in the end, everyone will be happy. The best sites created will be rewarded, all the other sites should have some traffic and the owners can monetize that, this will encourage submission of articles to these niches, there will be more publishers in the network, etc etc. the list goes on.
Best of all, you can repeat this process for any niche. And it’s a balanced, virtuous cycle: the new sites will likely use article promotion to get their sites off the ground, which means more articles submitted for that particular niche in addition to more publishers available.
Anyway, I hope that sounds interesting!
Best,
Anthony
November 27th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Hello Marc,
Thanks for this cool bonanza,…
I’d recommend that you open a competition where everyone is meant to be an affiliate of ‘plrpro.com’ or ‘AMA’ and let us all promote the products for 3 weeks straight using whatever means we choose - mainly PPC and SEO (Article marketing mainly). At the end of the 3 weeks, the top 3 people if the go over a particular threshold would get plrpro membership at half price (1/2 ) for life….
I think that would be great…
I was locked out of the plrpro membership, because i couldn’t get a reply to one of my emails on time, and so I am ready to win this and get to using plrpro to building my online business… And I strongly believe plrpro can help any serious person - who really desire online success to take their business to another level.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Hey Marc,
I pretty much agree with agree w/ Ant for the requirement of everyone to become an affiliate for AMA or better, Affilorama, and start with a new domain. (newly registered or recently acquired and no existing traffic).
2) However, instead of getting everyone to promote AMA, you could choose a random but realistic (not obscure) niche selected by a current (need or crisis) trend, i.e., ID theft or legal protection, health/wellness products, “green” products, loss of job/income, etc. for each contest lasting 60 days. Everyone generate traffic to the website for whatever keywords they feel they can rank for best and generate as much traffic as possible in a specific amount of time.
3) You look at:
a. quality of website/landing page (content, compliance, overall look/design), mention/feed of AMA blog, and,
b. sales with most income generated (ratio sales/$ income generated) and reward accordingly.
It’s even more win/win
Thanks,
Bob
November 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Dear Marc,
My idea for your Christmas AMA Competition is this:
1. Competitors have to set up a brand new site, dedicated to either one specific christmas gift (singular) or a certain type of christmas gifts (plural).
2. Make sure to emphasize that the site to be set up has to be dedicated to something with low competition. This is to guarantee that AMA will work in relatively little time and thereby demonstrate its power.
3. Let them write as many AMA articles as they want during a certain timespan to promote their Christmas product site. Say 2, 3 or 4 weeks.
4. At the end of the competition, ask people to submit their total visitor count, their conversion ratio, their number of sales and total revenue made. These numbers will be fun to have a look at for people. People like numbers that demonstrate success. Posting an overview such as this will surely get more people to sign up for AMA.
5. You can either let the person who made the most sales or the person who made the most revenue win. Or you can weigh both factors in and calculate a winning score from it. Your call.
6. The top 10 winners get a free lifetime AMA membership. The Number 1 winner gets the other 9 winners as referrals as an added bonus for being Number 1.
Whichever competition you’ll end up selecting, I hope you’ll do well.
Sincerely,
Jay
November 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Hi Marc,
How about using google analytics on a site you control to track the contest results by having everyone promote the same site/page with links that include their email address for a certain time period? This would have the advantage of generating a clear winner complete with their contact information and with no ambiguity or possibility of foul play ( and some other advantages described below).
For instance, the links could look like this:
http://www.ama-contest-site.com?id=joeblow@gmail.com
Then you just click on the “Top Content” report to see unique pageviews in google analytics for the timeframe of the contest and you can see at a glance who the winner is and how to contact them, since this report tracks all unique urls to the same page, which would include the unique email address of each contestant.
You could also do screenshot(s) from there periodically to show everyone who the current top ten are (if you do this you could encourage people who don’t want to reveal their main email addresses to setup a gmail account just for the contest).
The simplest way to do this would be to have everyone link to just one target page (probably the homepage) that has one long article with lots of potential keywords embedded in the article, so that the only difference in all the links in the report would be the email address of the contestant.
BONUS IDEA: To spice up the contest even more you could put Adsense on the contest site and award the winner all the adsense revenue for the time period of the contest, or split the revenue between the top 3 or whatever. With lots of contestants and a niche that pays good adsense $ per click this could be substantial and very motivating. If you give periodic reports as mentioned above you could also show the running total of the “adsense pot” which will provide even more motivation as the contest goes on.
Of course you could modify this idea slightly if you want to get people promoting your affiliate program with the bonus in that case being affiliate commissions to everyone who participates, and the tracking in that case would of course need to be setup to work for affiliate links instead of email addresses in the links.
However, picking a niche site that you setup has some advantages over that:
1. It can be a learning experience for the participants where you teach them the plrpro way of creating niche sites, and it gives them the chance to prove to themselves they can actually generate traffic to a niche site BEFORE they go to all the trouble of learning all the technical details and effort of setting up their own niche site. This is arguably the biggest stumbling block for newbies, getting traffic and believing that “if they build it people will come”.
2. You could offer to email everyone their final total unique pageviews at the end of the contest so that even the people coming in last could see that they still got some results and then let them know ways they could have improved those results by choosing different keywords etc. As you probably know in Google Analytics you can click on the results in the report mentioned above to drill down to the “Entrance Keywords” for each url in the list.
3. This would also allow you to generate post contest stats that reveal the top generating keywords which could be very instructive. For instance if you got only a few hits for very competitive high traffic keywords and more hits for certain long tail keywords you could show to everyone that choosing “realisitic” less competitive keywords that have less traffic overall can generate much better results.
4. With google analytics there are lots of other things that could be included in your post contest stats report, which could be an excellent learning experience for everyone involved, and yet another reason to encourage people to get involved.
Good luck with your contest whatever you decide.
Brad
November 27th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Marc,
Spinning unique Articles with AMA and getting them published to hundreds of blogs, on a consistent basis, has brought me great success in raising my targeted Keywords in the major search engine rankings.
I have many clients in the UK and I use AMA as part of my overall marketing mix. Results are not instant, but with a steady consistent approach, publishing 1 spun article a week, gets good, and sometimes spectacular results, from about week 6 onwards.
If any AMA members are interested in having 500 to 600 word spun articles written for them, on any subject, we can provide these at a low cost.
Thanks,
Nick
November 27th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Cool.
How about you giving people certain keywords to rank for, if they fancy the idea, in a commercially viable niche. Either you just give them keywords that will be great for promoting AMA, or you first do a vote for which niche people would like to compete in. The one with the most votes wins…Main idea is that people are allowed to set up their own sites, mini sites, blogs, web2.0 sites etc. as many as they want, and at a certain point in time, say, 1 month later, or 2 weeks later, the one(s) with the most top 10 rankings in google at a certain time and date for a specific keyword gets a prize. Perhaps choose google.com instead of co.uk etc.
This idea could be extended by giving prizes for longer term rankings, e.g. in 2 months, who is still in the top 10 etc.
The actual time of the top 10 google measurement is up to you, and people will have to prove that the sites/ (or bookmarking submissions) are theirs.
Might work
Jan
November 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Sounds like a good idea. Selecting a niche where everybody will have an equal starting off point may be tricky.
November 27th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
How about if the contestants get a 15 day trial to promote one site. The sites are compared to see what is the biggest jump in backlinks.
More backlinks = higher PR = more traffic = more $$…
…hopefully.
November 27th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Hi Marc,
That’s a great idea and helpful to keep our focus on business amongst so many fun Holiday distractions!
One idea might be to have competitors start with a fresh domain in a niche they haven’t been in before. Each competitor would build out a site promoting only with AMA. Each competitor would have the ability to submit as many articles as they choose through AMA to as many relevant categories they choose.
At the end of the contest time frame each competing site could be judged on the number of back links coming into each new site. You could look at search engine ranking but that may be different for how competitive each niche is.
Because AMA is excellent for building quality back links it might be fun to compete on how many back links each competitor can generate in the time frame using only AMA.
Another measurement could be seeing how many times each article has been published to an AMA network site using the AMA dashboard and use that as a competitive measurement.
In any case, it sounds like a great contest. Count me in!
Thanks much,
Rachael
November 27th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Hello,
Firstly, thank you for making this opportunity available.
Now for the competition, since you are planning on giving a free article submission period to free members, why not have a competition be for the most articles submitted (according to your guidelines for submission) during that period by your free members. This would help the free members see the power of AMA and reward the focused effort to “win the most submissions prize” which could be a free AMA account for a particular period, or for life:)
Kind regards,
B.OBrien
November 27th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Hi,
I think its a good idea. There are a lot of those who are always ready to take part in different competitions. It will attract more people to win a prize and so it will widen the opportunity to make more sales. I wish you to turn your idea into reality. Why not?
Be happy, do not worry.
November 27th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Great idea Ant. How about this…
AMA creates a new sub-domain or page specifically for the contest to make tracking easier… a promotional landing page perhaps.
Contestants create a blog post with links to this landing page and promote the post via AMA.
AMA then calculates the winner, after a set amount of time, based upon the amount of hits each contestants post generates. Perhaps there is an added bonus for any sales generated for AMA via the landing page.
This way contestants benefit from traffic generated by their AMA articles and can be tracked easily through their blog posts, AMA benefits from traffic and possibly sales.
November 27th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
WOW AMA is just Awesome! Building thousands of quality, natural and organic backlinks to my money sites over a period of a few months has resulted in some Page 1 Google Rankings for competitive keywords for me!
Not to mention the support staff at AMA are very helpful, kind and professional. AMA is just a rocking service that I HIGHLY recommend!!!!!
Mike
November 27th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
With the new FTC guidelines in place beginning Dec 1st, the documented verifiability of testimonials has become an issue.
Why not start a contest which puts AMA to the test and also provides all the results data generated by each persons efforts during the contest?
Contest rules:
**Drive as much traffic as possible to a single landing page designated by AMA. Commissions are paid for sales generated with bonuses to contest winners as incentive for participation.
**The only method allowed for driving traffic is article submission through AMA.
**The only link allowed on a contestant’s article submission is the URL that AMA has designated.
**AMA attaches a bit of tracking code to the link of each submission, verifying its traffic source.
**The special tracking code must be added post submission, thereby preventing someone from shooting the affiliate link out to their email list, etc. We are looking to gather fresh testimonials with AMA results ONLY.
**Contestants must be willing to provide a statement of the results they’ve generated during the contest, after the contest has ended.
{”I generated 2000 new leads in just 10 days after submitting 20 unique articles using only AMA.”} And now AMA will have the data they’ve collected whereby they can prove these claims beyond the shadow of a doubt.
November 27th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Hey Mate,
Hope all is well.
Since AMA has two core parts, the competition should utilize both of these accordingly.
The first part is the actual article submission: This would be determined by the acceptance rate of each user’s article throughout the network over a set period of time.
The second part is rankings of course: The only way to do this would be to have new domains registered around the same time, with the same amount of content and in the same niche. Otherwise there are too many variables to influence rankings.
If it is a ranking competition, which it should be, then the competition shouldn’t be too fierce so that it takes a long time to measure the results. Something in the range of 50-100K in results would be a sweet spot.
The length should be 3 months and no more. The top 5 sites listed according to rank get whatever the reward is.
Take it easy
Adrian,
November 27th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Hello Marc,
I have been outsourcing the majority of my SEO up until a few months ago (3rd party company who does all the work). After I purchased your guy’s outsourcing course, the SEO will be taken in-house :>). I currently have 1 full time employee in the Philippines and if business continues to grow, will look to hire 1 or 2 more people the first quarter of 2010.
With respect to your questions:
I’ve been training this outsourcer for the past month and starting in December, she will use AM Automation — we already have about 8 articles published in Ezine articles.
A competition is a great idea. Suggest you set it up in the following way:
- There needs to be an apples to apples comparison so do a one verticle market every two weeks. For example, If the person is an affiliate or has a client or their own product in the “vitamin / supplement” verticle, get them to write a NEW article and submit to AMA.
- Create a site or forum where people can post this one article and others can grade the overall content.
- After two weeks, the applicant provides a screen shot of the total number of links from said article.
- The more links + the higher the average of the rating, that person wins. The contestants themselves are engaged by rating articles + AM Automation is being used. Combination of the two (using a point system) is the winner for that period of time and that specific verticle.
- Winner gets 3 articles per month written by your guys’ team for a period of 3 months and submitted to AM Automation.
Great Idea.
Regards,
Jaime Paredes
November 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
1. Join AMA (3 Levels - to be able to differentiate various levels
of experience)
2. Any niche choice will be fine
3. Award results: a) traffic & profit b) traffic increase only
c) fastest results d) Google ranking
4. The approach needs to be “AMA free submission only”.
5. Let the games begin for a set time.
6. Award solid efforts as well as results
7. Perhaps a short step-by-step guide (recipe) how to
so it’s easier for anyone to start the mini competition.
8. Make it friendly for the long-term success.
And MANY thanks for all your help you offer to
all of us - that’s rare and MUCH appreciated!
Thank you…Lu
November 27th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
The trick with a competition is making it fair for all. I would suggest using a target like EzineArticles or GoArticles or some other site like that. Then I would create a list of a few hundred keywords that all have roughly the same amount of competition (like 50,000 to 80,000 results in Google when searched using quotes).
Then the competition would go as follows.
The person with the highest number of top 10 results for their articles promoted solely with AMA would win.
So, they have to post articles to the target site optimized for a given keyword. Then they need to use AMA exclusively to promote that article. If their article remains in the top 10 at the end of the contest, it counts toward their total. The person with the highest total of top 10 results at the end wins the prize.
The whole trouble with this type of contest however is preventing someone from using another tool along with AMA to get their results (ie forum spam, etc).
Glen.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Hi Marc and Daniel
I have an idea that will help convince site owners that AMA can really help them in the search engine rankings of their sites.
Firstly, AMA must emphasize the importance of creating diverse backlinks through article submission using AMA. It allows niche websites to rank better in search engines for targeted keywords.
Invite potential AMA users or site owners to try AMA for free and encourage them to submit unlimited unique articles for a period of 2 to 3 weeks to test run the effectiveness of AMA in getting their websites rank better in search engines for their specific keywords.
Hold a competition for the free trial period with 2 purposes;
- to encourage participation from serious site owners eager to get their sites rank well in search engines
- to prove that AMA does help them to achieve that
The prizes for the winner(s) of the competition;
- either cash prizes or
- free lifetime membership for AMA
The deciding factor for the winner(s) is;
- the website that manages to get rank Number 1 Position (or Page 1), in the shortest time possible in Google.com for a pre-selected keyword
Rules for the competition;
- site owners submit name of website and keyword for the competition
- AMA staff verifies that keyword is not rank anywhere in Google.com for the site submitted
- AMA staff issue participating site owners with free AMA accounts for article submission all at the same time
- site owners must only use articles submitted through AMA for the keyword they have selected to help build backlinks and improve site ranking
- site owners inform AMA once they manage to achieve Number 1 Position (or Page 1) in Google.com
- AMA staff verifies the ranking position in Google.com and check that only backlinks from AMA blogs are used
- AMA staff declare winner(s) and issue prizes
I believe this competition will attract lots of attention from site owners, especially for those ’standing at the edge of the fence’ who are very keen to know if AMA can really help them in their site ranking in search engines. This competition will help them make that important decision.
AMA will get a chance to prove it to all and I am confident AMA will not disappoint.
I am a strong believer of building quality backlinks to improve site ranking in search engines and I am certain AMA will help.
Thanks and that’s all from me.
Syl
November 27th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Having an open submission period is absolutely an excellent idea! And yes, I think there should be a competition, and it should be something you can track - so therefor it should be as an affiliate of AMA.
Maybe something like this:
1) Free members register as AMA affiliates and use the open period to generate and drive traffic to their site.
2) AMA makes a list of Keywords they will check rankings on in Google. Then it will become a contest to see who can rank the highest for the Keywords in the list by a certain time period.
3) WINNERS
-The person with the most Top 10 results in Google wins: Free Membership + $500 Via Paypal +150 Uniquely written Articles for the keywords of their choice.
-The Person with the highest ranking in Google for each specific Keyword: $250 Via Paypal (you can win this more than once) + Membership for life + 50 Uniquely written Articles for the keywords of their choice.
-People with the next 2 highest positions for each keyword: Free Membership for life + $100 Paypal.
Yes, I put the free membership in each of the winner categories cause I think it is really valuable!
Also, there could be rewards for people with the most sales and most leads in the system by a certain date. Prizes:
- Person with the most sales: $1000 Paypal + Free Membership + 200 Uniquely written Articles for the keywords of their choice.
- Person with the most leads in system: $250 + Free Membership + 50 Uniquely written Articles for the keywords of their choice.
Also, Include a random drawing that EVERYONE is eligible for.
1st Prize - $500 Paypal
2nd Prize - $250 Paypal
3rd Prize - $100 Paypal
This is going to be fun!!!!!!!
November 27th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Competition should be something that involves creativity, and cannot be outsourced.
Here is my competition and rating system idea:
Everyone will submit a maximum 5 minute video that outlines exactly what they do to effectively get top search engine rankings, and articlemarketingautomation must be a main aspect of it.
This video will show a real time example of someone doing keyword research, finding low competition keywords with lots of traffic, and then show their process for systematically ranking for whatever keywords they are trying to dominate.
There’s lots of different methods someone could have to do this (and different tools they may be using). Examples or how they outsource if they do, how much they spin articles, how long their articles are, how many links they have etc.
This could be really informative to people that are unsure on exactly what to do to get top rankings for their main site, as well as feeder sites.
Rating could be in the form of a poll that must be answered within the AM account interface as to avoid spammers that may spam votes. These videos could all be posted on youtube or a similar sites, and then the urls can be sent to Marc (and screened).
I believe this would be a fun competition that people would take place in, as long as there is some sort of incentive such as a price (similar to how comments on this blog post are incentivized.)
-Ryan
November 27th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Hey Marc,
Let me answer your questions one at a time:
“What will you do with this free article submission period?”
I will try to rank my affiliate sites for profitable long tail keywords – [product name], [product name review], long [how to…] phrases, [get rid of…] phrases, call to action phrases etc…
One article per site, per day of the free article submission period. Believe me, I’m getting the articles ready now
“Do you think we should do a mini competition?”
Hell yeah! Competitions are fun
And of course, they get people involved and drive them to take action… and in marketing the most important to do is to get people into action mode. Either promoting you, or buying from you, you want them to stop procrastinating, and start doing.
A competition would be an excellent way to have people get results and prove the true value of AMA.
“If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?”
I think a ranking competition among the free members to see who is making the most use and getting the most traffic from the free article submission period. That would be a great way to promote AMA for the short term and long term:
Short term: lot’s of people will try to rank their sites so they win the competition. When they get the results from the actual submission, they will see how valuable it is and stay for that value.
Long term: you will be left with lot’s of screenshots and real world proof that AMA works (and you can even have a nice title above the testimonial\proof section in the sales letter: “Here are the real world results our members got only in a couple of days!”)
Here is how I would calculate the amount of point each person gets: ranking in page one of google X the exact searches for that keyword phrase a month. – when the ranking are calculated like this:
Ranking in the 10 spot = 1 point
Ranking in the 9 spot = 2 point
Ranking in the 8 spot = 3 point
Ranking in the 7 spot = 4 point
Ranking in the 6 spot = 5 point
Ranking in the 5 spot = 6 point
Ranking in the 4 spot = 7 point
Ranking in the 3 spot = 9 point
Ranking in the 2 spot = 11 point
Ranking in the 1 spot = 13 point
(spots 1,2 and 3 get extra credit because they are extra hard to get)
Example: if you get to the 4′th spot for the keyword [how to stop a dog from barking] which get’s 1,900 searches a month, you scored 7 X 1,900 points = 13,300 points.
Question: but what if someone already has a listing in the first page?
Answer: than you calculate the gained positions X exact match monthly searches (when going from 4 to 3, from 3 to 2, and from 2 to 1 are each worth 2 points).
Example: you took [how to stop a dog from barking] from position 5 to position 2:
From 5 to 4, that’s one position, so that’s 1,900 points. From 4 to 2, that’s 2 double point positions so that’s 1,900 X 4=7,600. 7,600 + 1,900=9,500.
Question: How will this be conducted?
Answer: Each person wanting to participate in the competition will take a screenshot of the first page of google for the selected keywords that he chose to try and rank for.
A few weeks after the free submission period ends (we need to give the article submission time to get their full effect in rankings), you take screenshots of the 1’st page again for all the keywords you gained rank for.
Add everything up, and whoever gets the most points win.
Question: Won’t the people with lot’s of sites have an unfair advantage over the people who just have a few sites, discouraging them from participating in the first place?
Answer: that’s possible. The solution can be simple – limit the amount of sites each person can gain points from to a specific number, Like 3 or 5.
As for the prizes… I think you should go for an Audi TT… No? You sure? can’t blame a guy for trying
Lifetime/yearly access to AMA or PLRPro would be great. They’re awesome services. What more can we ask? Well, except perhaps cold hard cash
“Who can get the fastest results through AMA?”
I think that the smart marketer that knows how to plan out his keyword strategy and go for the low hanging fruit can get not only the fastest, but the most long lasting results from AMA.
The one that throws a lot of high quality content pages that aim to rank for a large variety of long tail keyword phrases. When you have a resource like AMA that can get you a lot of links, your best way of using it is to throw a wide out there, and try catching as much as you can from that long tail goodness, by linking to all the individual pages with the proper anchor text.
“What do you think?”
I think I have a competition to get ready for
November 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Hi Marc,
At this time of year when the majority of us are busy absorbing ourselves in Christmas festivities, there are always many people that for one reason or another are unable to enjoy the season.
I would be really keen on a competition that was totally based around generating some much needed funds for those less privileged than ourselves.
If I could be so bold as to take the basic concept of Ant’s idea above and add that the proceeds from the competition go towards one or two charitable organisations.
An example would be sick or underprivileged children.
For me the structure of the competition should always be about building a traffic flow and converting it to money - lets face it thats what we are here for.
However the motivation to enter the competition is the key to a successfull campaign.
Good luck to you all
Cheers
Steve
November 27th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
I think a competition is a great idea. Since the competition is for a free lifetime AMA access it makes sense for the competition to be around AMA as well.
I suggests a competition where everyone picks a niche and creates a site or web 2.0 page like squidoo, etc and tries to rank in top 10 on google for a specific keyword.
There should be competitive guideline set to avoid confusion. The guideline can be simple as no less then 10000 competing pages, etc…
I also recommend that who ever participates also post about the steps taken to get their page/site ranked for their target keyword on a separate blog somehwere. That way as a group everyone can check the steps followed by those sucessful in the competition and learn from it the proper use of AMA and marketing.
The reward of free lifetime AMA access sounds perfect.
November 27th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
How about who can generate the most active back links using AMA only.
1. Initate a start date for all contestants.
2. Contestants register the domain they wish to enter.
2. They can only use AMA for getting contextual back links
3. All contestants launch multiple articles with links to the competition domain
4. Set a target date of 3 months for the competition end.
5. At this point who has generated the most back links using AMA only gets the prize.
The back links should be checked with 1 back link checker - Yahoo Site Explorer.
November 27th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Aawww - Come on Santa Marc - skip the time sucking, money bleeding competition angle and simply give any of your FREE Members who have been with you a SPECIAL Yuletide Gift!
How about a $1 dollar discount for every URL they add to their account PLUS a further $1 discount off their monthly fees for every month they’ve been a Member?
Hmmm - Now let me see?
I’ve been a member since the beginning (so that’s about just over a year = $12 month off my full membership…) PLUS I have about 12 unique websites for others to post to (so that’s about another $12 bucks)…
RESULT - A Full Glass and a Half of Discount of the full Membership!
Rewarding members who stay longer, and build - build - build. I like it!
Competition? Naaa. No money in that
But I’d love to be a Lifetime member.
Dave
November 27th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I agree with Ant. A competition for building an online asset like a mailing list from scratch in any chosen niche would be a good idea.
Or a competition similar to 90DC which was there on PLRPRO, but a stripped down version like 30DC, whoever makes most money wins the membership
Cheers!
November 27th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
What will you do with this free article submission period?
- learn how to use it, then use it (of course)
Do you think we should do a mini competition?
- absolutely
If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
- the reward should be a lifetime AMA membership and a private coaching from you + cash via paypal
The competition:
Start with idea number 1:
ORIGINAL CONTEST
- you choose 1 niche, a start and finish date (3 month period for the grand final, with winners for each month)
- you choose the target keyword
- everybody who wants to be in, should have a new domain that no longer than a month
- the only method allowed is only by using AMA. anybody using other method will be disqualified and can not be a winner
- you can also give some categories to the contest:
for example: most backlinks, google rank (on your chosen date), google page rank, alexa rank, or else
+ PRODUCT LAUNCH
- the contest could be more interesting if you combine it with a product launch. you have a product to launch, and run this contest to sell your product. whoever get the most sales will be a winner. the second category could be the most leads.
+ CREATIVE CONTEST: AMA vs ROBOT
- other idea is to run a contest AMA members VS The Robot. It would be an SEO contest. Participant can choose either will be on AMA side, or on robot side. What I mean robot here is a robot/script to generate a web/blog, i.e: wprobot, wpmixer, site profit bot, or something alike.
You make 2 groups, each with same amount of people.
This will be huge contest.
And the prize could also be great, because you could get a prize from each of the bot maker.
The winner could get ALL of these:
- Lifetime AMA membership
- WP Robot Full Package License
- WP Mixer Full License
- Site Profit Bot + all the OTO
etc…
or
+ AMA vs OTHER
You can also make a contest:
AMA vs other article marketing
+ AMA vs other SEO Tools
+ AMA vs Social Media
+ AMA vs …
The ideas is unlimited…
Am I an AMA lifetime membership winner?
You decide…
Regards,
Daniel Agustianus
November 27th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
1. What will you do with this free article submission period?
- Try some new styles of article that attract a different audience and take some risks!
2. Do you think we should do a mini competition?
- No, you should do a big competition - always GO LARGE! - It’s Xmas pick a charity and let’s ALL work on using AMA to drive traffic there - BIG BIG traffic.
- They win
- We get some creative use of AMA
- I bet you get some real old-world media coverage
November 27th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Yes, I think a mini competition is a great idea!
Traditionally, Christmas is a time of giving and focusing on others rather than on ourselves. Therefore, my idea is to use AMA to promote the web sites of charitable organizations rather than our own. Just think of how much good we could put out into the world this Christmas season by using our SEO skills and AMA to help some very worthy causes.
So with that in mind, my competition idea looks like this:
1) Choose a favorite non-profit, charitable organization
2) Visit their web site and do a little keyword research to choose 1-3 appropriate keyword phrases. I suggest focusing on products, programs and services that they offer.
3) Write 3 articles that are relevant to the keyword phrases chosen in step 2.
4) Create spinnable versions of the articles.
5) Submit the 3 articles to AMA to promote the web site of the charitable organization of your choice. Create at least 2 links to the organization’s web site in each article, using the keywords you chose as the anchor text.
6) Anyone who completes the above steps would then be eligible to win one of the prizes. Prize winners will be chosen by a random drawing.
Prizes could include AMA lifetime membership (my top choice), cash prizes or gift cards to popular online stores.
The advantages to this type of contest are many, but here are just a few…
1) It would be easy and quick to implement for the upcoming Christmas season.
2) Members with less experience and resources have an equal chance of winning.
3) More people will participate if they feel they might have a chance to actually win.
4) After completing the contest, folks new to AMA now have the experience they need in order to promote their own web sites.
Non-profits are really struggling due to the downturn in the economy and high unemployment rates. Here is a way that we as a group can help some of them out and promote the use of AMA at the same time. Sounds like a huge WIN-WIN to me.
November 27th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Sales letters and testimonials might look great but who believes them any more?
To me article sites are well just article sites who all want unique content that is in most cases outsourced and ultimately written by people who have no real interest in what they are writing about but to make money any way they can. So you get lots of unique quantity at the expense of quality. Then you have the black hat tactics used to get one’s otherwise ordinary article ranked up with the best.
Competition - Nay I don’t think so.
Why? There is enough ordinary content on the net without having a competition to add even more. Take a look at the offline world if I want to read War and Peace or some other novel I want to read that novel not one of the upteen versions of it. If I spend the time to write an article from my expertise I want that article published as is, not to have thousands of versions of it so that I satisfy everyone’s wish for unique content.
I call article marketing virtual Chinese whispers!
Keries
November 27th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Address the common issue, matching the problem with the solutions.
Pain Points:
- Many of us have good ideas on how to pick a niche and create beautiful websites and blogs, but the problem is they cannot rank those keywords on top page? As a result, they don’t get the traffic to the website.
- People want to get more backlinks but they don’t have the right method.
Target:
- Website owners, Blog owners, Business Owners, etc
- People have an existing website.
Goal:
(1) Obviously we are trying to get more people to signup with AMA because we believe the product is the cutting edge tool to get you up to the top of Google first page.
(2) We show the result to the potential AMA customers that AMA can get your website rank higher and bring it more backlinks, higher positon ranking and more traffic to your websites.
Motivation:
Many people want free stuff but often when they get the 2 weeks free trail , they will not move their ass to do explore the product. Well, thats human nature! So I think we should definitely run a small competition to stimulate / motivate people to explore the product whether it is suitable for them.
So here this is what we are going to do. We are giving you the opportunity to try AMA and let you see the power of this tool.
No bullshit, Pure result~!
Competition:
Get most of the backlinks to a website in 4 weeks time.
This competition is designed to help you to see the benefit of AMA, and how we can help you to get the most relevant anchor text backlinks to your website. Dude, backlinks mate….this is gold. This will make your website better than others.
How to measure the competiton result?
Quantity + Quality = Result
Well, Google is doing the same thing on Quality Score right? We can measure it with the same effect.
(1) Quantity: Total number of articles spinned in AMA during the competition period.
(2) Quality: The quality of their spinning, for example,
300% difference from the original Title
100% difference then the original content
e.g. Jimmy spun 1000 articles in 4 weeks in which this will give him 1000 points, and within those 1000 articles he managed to score 300% difference in title, and 100% difference for content.
Score:
1000 articles x 100 (100% difference in content) + 300 (300% overall title difference) = 100300
* Why we give more points for the content? Because content is king, the bigger the difference is the higher acceptance you can get in AMA Network, and also Google won’t see your content as duplicate. Fair ?
Note:
- Article must be at least 350 words.
- Competition Duration: 4 weeks
- Participants must submit their website for the competition.
- Participants must submit to more than one category.
*****Important for AMA - Daniel and Marc:****
I won’t tell people the winner’s website because Google will hunt you down all your backlinks! Don’t screw the AMA please.
I won’t measure how many backlinks the participants get for the website because search engines take a longer time to show backlinks record.
Haven’t said that People will see the result over the time for sure.
Rewards:
- 6 Months one on one consultation with Marc and Daniel (Gold)
Marc or Daniel will give you free consultation on how to get your affiliate website with more traffic and earn more money~!
- Free Progression Internet Marketing membership for life
- Free AMA for life
- Free Affilorama Premium Memebership for 1 year
- Plus $1000 cold hard cash
This will definately movitate me to do better on AMA because I know it will make the difference.
Umm…I think I am going to win the prize by just contributing this info.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
High Marc
Thanks for the opportunity to add some trial articles to AMA from next week. I’m looking forward to it. I hope the trial will be for more than just a few days and allow more than just a few articles to be added, and that the articles will remain on distribution for long enough after the trial to generate some worthwhile back links.
The idea of a competition during the trial is interesting, but I’m afraid you won’t get my participation if it’s all about promoting somebody else’s choice of keywords or webpage, as some contributors suggest above. With such a short time left until Christmas, I also think its a bit late to require a new domain to be purchased with much hope of seriously profitable results by the Holidays.
Surely we are all far too busy promoting our own existing businesses at this time of year to be distracted by some contrived competition that has no benefit to us unless we win the prize. For me, access to the promised AMA article submission trial is a serious business opportunity, and should not be turned into a game.
At the risk of being labeled a Scrooge or a Grinch, you won’t get me convinced to use the trial opportunity to promote a charitable cause. I’ll be sharing my profits to spread around Christmas cheer in my local community come Christmas Eve, but first I need the profits.
I think the competition should be all about using AMA to improve our own businesses. I believe it all boils down to using AMA to improve keyword search results.
You will get my attention if the competition is simply for the number of new first page SERP results achieved through using AMA during the trial period.
There will have to be some small print conditions, and you and your team will not want to have to do a lot of work to verify the winners.
Here is my suggestion:
Everybody in the trial will be free to enter by the closing date with their claimed number of new page 1 rankings.
You will then invite the top 10-20 entrants to prove their claims. I think images of before and after page 1 SERP pages is enough to prove they have moved up to page 1 with their site. “Before” will be before submitting the AMA article(s) targeting the keyword phrase, and “after” will be at the closing date for the competition. You will have to allow at least a couple of weeks to see the effect. Six weeks would be better, but perhaps the trial period will be too short for that to be realistic.
To keep it serious, the SERP images should be taken for phrase match searches, and the “before” ranking image should show the keyword phrase has at least 20,000 competing pages. Less would be too easy, but much more would be tough to achieve in just a few weeks. A longer competition could allow for a bigger level of competition.
I suggest it will be too difficult to try and limit the back linking methods used to just AMA - it’s just too hard to police that. We don’t have full control of who links to our pages, and Google and Yahoo don’t reveal the full back linking story anyway. And we should be getting diverse back links as a matter of course, with social bookmarking and so on. Silly not to. If there are at least 2 or 3 AMA articles submitted for the targeted keyword, and linking to the site shown in the SERP results, I think that is enough to prove AMA has played a big part in the results.
I imagine AMA would have a powerful promotion story to tell if you could say “Joe Blow took 10 pages to page 1 on Google in two weeks using AMA.”
If you want to add some spice to benefit AMA, you could set an “entry fee” - like adding “X” new good quality AMA sites during the trial period in order to participate in the competition. You could measure the value added by a points weighting system - 1 for a basic site and extra points for separate IPs and higher PR.
However, I would not like to see an incentive created for pumping out a vast number of junky AMA sites. Nor should site creation become a wasteful diversion of effort during the limited article submission trial period.
As to the prize, various levels of PLRPro/AMA memberships are good. PLR site content is also good. Cash, of course, is better! It would be encouraging to have several prizes, not just a winner takes all competition.
November 27th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Competition is great.
But we must do smart competition.
How if you decide the specific keyword to compete ?
With new domain as the condition.
Only using AMA for backlinks
Who are on the 10 highest rank of Google are the winner.
This just my two cent.
thanks
November 27th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Thanks for Mark Ling who introduced ama to me from his speaking for PPC Classroom from the recording of it.
This is really awesome tool and I’ve already signed up for free member in ama.
Thanks to Marc Lindsay as well. I believe you and Mark has some great relationship?
November 28th, 2009 at 12:12 am
1) I will use the free submission time, to upload all the great content that my writers have been writing for me and get great backlinks using the network for my sites.
2) I do think we should have a mini-competition and I think the competition would be to see who could prove the most effective use of the free time, by blogs added and articles entered into the system. For the reward, I think that you could say, that everyone that entered would have to give the members a link from one of their good PR sites. or at least help them get a high PR link as their reward.
I guess fastest results would be a consideration as well, although that may can be fudged a little on what “results” means.
Thanks for the chance,
Mark
November 28th, 2009 at 2:36 am
“I think a competition is a great idea, especially for those who have never witnessed the power of AMA in action.
In terms of a competition, it needs to be something that shows off how powerful AMA is while also allowing for fun. My idea is to see who can submit the most articles and have the fewest number rejected. The challenge wouldn’t be spitting out the most articles, but creating valuable content to distribute around the AMA network. Obviously, a single unspun article would not be as valuable as an article that was diverse and able to be distributed to a multitude of websites. There could be points awarded to the number of successfully approved articles distributed as well as points deducted for having articles rejected. There would also be points awarded to website owners for approving the available articles. The winners would be those with the highest total of points.for submission/approval.”
I like your idea Marc, and i will go with the same thought, but there are 2 points that would be great to add for this type of competition:
1) Article should be 100% different then the original.
2) Website owner will Vote the article for its quality e.g. 5\5 or 10\10
thanks,
Rushikesh
November 28th, 2009 at 7:24 am
What will you do with this free article submission period?
Take my first headlong crack into article submitting, focusing most likely on the product and model numbers method.
Do you think we should do a mini competition?
At least. Why not a Grand Prix of competitions? Well, actually a mini’s a good idea because everyone’s so busy this time of year with family, the kids being home, and holidays and the flu and, for some, a day job (since they haven’t harnessed the horses of AMA, right?), so I’m for some fairly simple mini competition that still leaves room for creativity and style in the criteria.
If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
I like the year of AMA reward already mentioned, of course. How about a lifetime membership in all your other products: PGB, the PLR e-book membership, etc. In other words, make the reward huge in relation to the nature of the “mini” competition among free members, and see the fire it lights under our tails.
Who can get the fastest results through AMA?
Why, me, of course. Why do you ask?
What do you think?
I think it’s a grand gesture, a great idea, a marketing mushroom cloud (in a good way–visibility and awe, no destruction or radiation), and instead of you guys drawing most of this attention, it’s FREE members doing it. I think you might take a little market share from each of your article marketing competitors, and if everybody really does sprint all out for those big prizes, I would imagine they’d stick around as paying customers even if they don’t end up in the top ten prizewinners, as they see the $$ results begin to roll in from their competition efforts. Maybe another 50 or so runners up could be awarded one more free month in which to keep it up and REALLY start to see the harvest, mouths-watering to pay whatever you want ‘em to for the rest of the months of their lives.
But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Robert Donahue
November 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
It Would be nice if any of this internet stuff worked! I do all the things I am supposed to do and nothing but I will not give up! Have a fab Christmas or Thanks Giving where ever you are. Life is a bitch then you marry one!!
November 28th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I like David Foard’s idea with getting credit or a discount for every unique site added. I have dozens but really wouldn’t use more than a dozen for this anyways.
Having done this before with another similar membership, I put 18 of my top sites, all with unique I.P.s and for my thanks I got charged premium price to be a member of something that uses MY sites to help them make money, and the same content submitted dozens of times a day PER-SITE!
Yeah right! I ended my membership very quick.
I’ll also say that as I mentioned, I have being part of something similar in the past and found there needs to be caution with the content used on the sites. Nothing ticks me off more than lousy content used only for backlink purposes, and I will ALWAYS remove these garbage articles.
Contest? Hmmm… Ok well all I can think of is perhaps something that will promote people using great content for the articles. So maybe a “highest ranking article” contest.
Whoever gets an article listed on Google within the top 2 pages for their given keyword.
Thanks
November 28th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Most of these suggestions, if not all, have been quantitative. Why not have an additional category for qualitative postings.
See who can write a post that is all about the target reader while getting the message across.
Write an article relating to the needs of the target from the reader’s point of view.
Judging criteria - The target reader says, “Wow! This article is all about me,” as opposed to this is all about the product/service,concept/idea.
Of course, the article has to “sell” the product/service,concept/idea, but do so strictly within relating to the reader.
I’d volunteer to judge this, and/or help select a panel of 3-4 not entered to judge this.
Ted
November 29th, 2009 at 5:03 am
I think a fun contest would be to see who can get the most listings on the first 2 pages of Google for a given keyword. The keyword would have to come from a pre-selected list to make it fair with all the keywords on the list having similar competition.
The prize for this competition should be a lifetime membership to AMA.
I would use my free submissions during this period to drive traffic to my productivity tips and tools site with the end goal of helping 500 internet marketers achieve millionaire status.
November 30th, 2009 at 12:05 am
Mini Competition- is that four weeks or 2 months. Four weeks sounds like a plan if AMA can be utilized in such a time frame to see a difference.
To show how effective AMA can be, I would have keywords targeted with high competition value ( a preset number like 1 million plus) and we must target our own websites keywords to see the value.
Targeting charity websites to promote causes is good but I believe difficult to prove keywords targeted. Plus seeing your own site raise thru the ranks is much more compelling than a charity website. - How about AMA donate $100 to said charity instead of promoting charity.
I would like to argue that having a first, second, and third place winner seems to restrictive. How about top 5 percent gets this or that and next 5 percent is a different member.
For example: AMA Elite Members for 2009 are the top 5 percent of the competition. Then stagger down from there. You could have the elite members have free AMA privileges and stagger the discount from 75 percent off to 25 percent off.
On a whole, psychology plays a part. Now pay attention because I charge for this and I am giving it away for free here at AMA discussion board:
People will stay on as customers when they have a discount More people are paying even though not a full rate, your income retention will be higher - longer than someone who has to pay full value.
To get the competition going, you can either let people use AMA as intended if solicit the winner on how they use AMA so to provide quality content to AMA members..
November 30th, 2009 at 2:11 am
What about something simple and achievable for everyone. Use AMA to produce your articles and submit an article to Ezine articles. Using AMA and any other free tools you like get as many views of your article on the ezine articles site as possible. After 4 weeks the author with the most views wins.
A great prize would be membership to your outsourcing programme so that the winner can ramp up the process.
All the best.
Mike
November 30th, 2009 at 8:34 am
1. am newbie and do not have a blog that fully optimized. By the way i buy a new website and submit an articles to see the effectiveness of AMA. For me if my adsense click rate better than before it already proof me that AMA is really good for articles submission and get exposed.
2. It is a really good idea.
3. But my opinion is to run the mini competition specially for only a new site. So everybody have a fair competition.
The best reward? Why don’t you put your effort to ensure that the winner website will get in top 3 Google.
4. I think the benefit will goes to the new site as we can compare our old site without AMA and the new one with AMA.
5. I think the free trial period should be extended to give time for us to write and re-write articles and submit with the highest possible quality content.
November 30th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Ahh..I love a good competition
How about something like this…
To make it far for all it would be good if you guys could setup say 10 new websites in 10 different niches (perhaps in categories that don’t get many article submissions through AMA).
On these 10 sites put some unique content and display adsense prominently as well as a few affiliate links.
Over a 30-60 day people can use AMA to get links to these sites to increase the traffic and earning of the money sites.
You could use it as a case study for members by creating screen shots of Adsense earnings, google analytics data, affiliate earning etc. Would be good for promoting AMA down the track as well.
All the proceeds of the adsense and affiliate commissions from these 10 sites could then be distributed to…
- the members of AMA or
- the top referers (based on analytics) or
- the people when created the most articles
as cash via Paypal or free membership to you other sites or you could use it as prizes for other things like…
- Prize for adding more sites to the network
- Prize for increasing the c-class IP diversity of the network
- Prize for promoting AMA to new members and increasing the size of the AMA network
It would be like each member of AMA (or only those who promoted the sites) would have a share in these websites. Great for retention of members as over time 12-24 months the number of money sites would increase.
10 sites every 2 months = 60 sites per year x 2 years = 120 sites
Each earning conservatively $5 per day = $600 /day
Therefore per month = $18,000
Ok I am getting ahead of myself here.
But if you are giving away even $10,000 to members of AMA each month I’m sure word would spread and the community would grow helping us all in the long run.
There have been some great suggestions from others so I look forward to seeing what you come up with in the end.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:05 am
First, thank you for providing the 5 free article submission credit. I am have just built a site in hair loss niche and i would be using this credit to promote my new site.
Competition is always a good thing. So i would be more than happy to be a part of a competition if its a mini Competition or even a large scale one.
So for me a good competition should benefit everyone taking part in it. Its not only about the winners. Today many fail trying to make money because they don’t take action with what they learn. So when some one is putting in their time and effort to get in to a competition, there should be some reward for them irrespective of them winning or loosing. So here is my suggestion for the competition . AMA users need to create a video (not more than 10 minutes) where they show a real example of how they put AMA in to good use. They can talk strategies they use that gives them result. They can submit the videos to AMA and we can create a new youtube channel for the competition. The best video can be selected either based on ratings or by AMA panel itself. These competition has a lot of benefit. Who ever creates a video can use it for his affiliate promotions of AMA. Also AMA will have a good bunch of video that can be a part of AMA training. This is not going to be easy competition to run but will certainly be a fruitful one.
I am sure AMA can be put in to good use if you take action. It has taken me few years to find out that IM is not rocket science. So just keep its simple, take action and profit.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:08 am
I will use the free article submission period to prepare for the new year.
Although the results from using AMA come incredibly quickly, this is not a game of overnight success, so I will submit articles that will boost my rankings for sites that will do well in the longer term.
I’m not sure a competition of seeing who can rank for anything is a good idea.. if a person submits articles then the outcome is a foregone conclusion - they will rank for their terms, so that is probably not interesting enough.
How about a countdown to christmas? Each day, from now until christmas, you choose an article that a free member has submitted, then give them a prize?
The prizes don’t have to be spectacular as it would be more about getting people to submit articles. Then, just before christmas, you choose one or more of the free members that have submitted articles during the countdown, and give them an extra special christmas present?
That would get lots of articles submitted, make lots of people happy, demonstrate the power of AMA, attract more members, and make a very nice christmas for the winners.
November 30th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Hi Guys,
Great idea and thanks for the free time.
Ive been a fr member from the beginning, havent taken the plung because I have been busy buildin my sites with your help and find it difficult to write enough articles for my sites and Ezine, Sqidoo etc and not quite at the point where I can outsource. Cant get my head round the spinner thing yet either. I can always tell a spun article when its sent to me for submission.
Anyway I think we sould keep it simple and you choose the best article submitted based on what you would want every article submitted to represent the quality of AMA and use them as role models for all AMA members.
Alan
November 30th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Well, ’tis the season’…
Since it is the ‘Giving Season’, I thought it would be appropriate to come up with an idea that would measure an individual’s ability to utilize AMA’s capabilities to its fullest while creating value for others.
Recognizing that AMA is solely about article marketing and not (at least not directly) about creating websites or sales pages, and recognizing that the only way to fairly judge any contest is if all individuals are starting from a level playing field, here is my idea:
1. Each participant in the contest picks a charitable cause. The charity must have an existing website and the website should rank POORLY in the SERPs prior to the contest for a keyword that is selected for this contest (e.g. “charitable giving”). I suggest that the chosen charity be no higher in Google than page 10. The specific position in Google, Bing, and Yahoo should be recorded prior to the start of the contest.
2. Each participant utilizes AMA (and only AMA) to submit content.
3. At the end of the contest, the results from the SERPs are re-evaluated. The charitable cause that moved the most (on average) will be the winner. Bonus points should be awarded for first page placement and for multiple listings (if they didn’t exist before).
As far as what I will do with my “free” AMA time…
I am going to test AMA against other article marketing programs. I will create a number of new, one-page Wprdpress sites and then use one of several article marketing tools (including AMA) to see which site/page obtains the best improvement in ranking over time. To control for variables, the sites will all be exactly the same aside from changing the one keyword (long tail) that will be promoted through the article marketing tools.
Adam
November 30th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Hi All
I think an idea for your christmas competition would be to have each applicant register with you, and nominate one URL and one keyword that they want to target - a competitive one with at least a million pages competing for it and that your URL does not rank in the top 1000 positions at the start of the competition.
I think you should make the competition short like 4 weeks … because we all do not have the concentration span that we used to.
The applicants can use AMA and only AMA to propel their page up the rankings. Maybe AMA should do some auditing on this before awarding their prizes.
The winner will be the applicant with the highest ranking for the most competitive term.
Lots of people think that it is impossible to make a serious dint on page ranking for highly competitive terms.
I have used nothing but AMA and hit position 1 for a term with a competition of 18.3 million and I was able to do this in about 4 weeks.
What I think is great about this competition is that
1. Each applicant works on only 1 website. Their own website whether it is old or new. This does not discriminate against those of us who have not mastered outsourcing yet.
2. It will not be too time intensive for the applicants
3. Any applicant will see results for their own website by doing this work
4. AMA will get proof of its power to crack competitive keywords too. It will be good for clients to know that in 4 weeks they can get some pretty impressive results.
5. Applicants do not have to create a new website. Any website provided the website is not in the top 1000 rankings could enter.
6. Maybe AMA could help with using their API key to determine the rankings for the applicant’s website when they start the competition (for those who did not get an API key). If it is possible maybe AMA could give special prizes to the person who climbed the most if you can quantify just how deep your website is in the rankings below 1000 (if google gives out this info)
7. You could make this contest eligible for all if you allowed any person a four week free trial period to promote only one website and only one entry per person or per IP.
8. The purpose of AMA is about getting rankings not getting hits from the pages that your articles appear on.
I think there should also be a general raffle prize for anyone that enters to encourage everyone to give it a go even if they are not going to win the big prize.
I think a great additional prize would be 100 spun articles written for the winner. Say 300-400 words for any (non offensive) keywords. Articles to be delivered within a minimum time say 1 month but no maximum. May be this could be awarded to the person with the highest uptake percentage over the competion period. This rewards quality writting.
And may be another 100 spun articles written for the person who has the highest percentage spin during the competition. This rewards original content.
regards
Corina
November 30th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Hi,
I’m going to use this free period to start promoting a number of my new sites I just built.
Because I have a few sites that are in mini and micro niches and I’m not sure how AMA will do for mini niches since I don’t know if there are site owners relevant (in some sort of a way) to my niches (that is why I haven’t decided yet if I want to become a paid member).
I would like to see results for a mini/micro niche (and I’m sure many other site owners would - especially if they are newbies)
Therefor I believe the contest should be done with that on mind.
Pick a mini niche and let us all attack it and see whether we bring the results or not - this will be a great way to proof all those who doubt AMA that it’s the real deal even for mini niches.
The winners should be - Top X number of people on serp results for specific keywords or 1st page rankers for certain keywords
You can choose a time frame or to start a 7 day countdown whenever the first one gets to the top page results.
I also agree with Anthony who suggested a site owners contest which will increase the amount of sites in each niche (extremely important for all of us!)
For the top prizes I believe everyone would like to have a free AMA membership ( maybe discounts for the runner ups?)
Anyway as an outsource method member I know you guys are doing a great job and I hope I will get to see the benefit from AMA to some small niches so I’ll be able to join without any doubt in my mind.
Thanks and Good luck to all!
Tom
November 30th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Further you could get applicants to create a brand new page for the competition on their website. Also the new page should only have one link to it from the client’s website. This could be confirmed with archive.net and it levels the playing field a bit more.
regards
Corina
November 30th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Hi Daniel,
Thanks so much for running this contest. I am an AMA publisher and I personally review most of the AMA articles published on my sites. From the number of article authors I see coming up repeatedly, it seems like some people are doing very well with your service.
I would LOVE to get a free membership to distribute articles on AMA. In my contest idea, I am trying to do something that’s fun, valuable to blog owners and article distributers, and will help people make money.
Here’s one idea: See how many different website publishers you could have publish articles with your keywords.
As an AMA publisher, I find I often get many of the same types of articles from the same people about the same topics to publish on my blogs. That is fine, but I am always excited to get new articles on “fresh” topics with a different twist.
One great thing that I have noticed is that a number of people have found creative ways to distribute articles on keywords that aren’t necessarily on the topics you’d expect, but they are still on target.
For example, having an article about solar panels - a common niche - where the focus is on saving money, Example: 5 Ways To Save Money In A Down Economy. rather than just “how to build a solar panel” or “the elements of a solar panel” or some other re-hash that I have already gotten a lot of similar articles to.
I can publish these articles on my personal finance blog, not just on my eco-friendly product blog.
THE CONTEST:
How many different AMA publishers can you get to publish your articles?
I think running this type of contest will help article authors be creative, introduce a new technique/strategy for them to try with AMA, and be a source of interesting new content for blog publishers. It will also increase IP diversity for AMA users who are getting back links.
Other examples:
Product keyword: yoga mats
Article title ideas:
How Can Yoga Help With Your Bad Back?
Is Yoga Effective At Helping You Lose Weight?
10 New Ways To Feel Better In The New Year.
Can New Moms Do Yoga At Home With A Baby?
It would not demand people build a new (from scratch) site, which not everyone will want to invest in. And it will highlight AMA and how to use it better for everyone involved. It will also potentially get writers a lot new blogs linking back to their sites and encourage the development of new more interesting content for the web. Let’s get people out of their ruts!
Thanks very much and looking forward to the webinar tonight!
Emily Cressey
AMA Blog Publisher
November 30th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Nice Idea. A few ideas to consider:
1) I believe if we have some teams who work together to create the biggest impact over the next four weeks. Call it a user group aproach. Each team, perhaps 2 people per team, could focus on a niche of their choice. Any profits would be donated to a charity. The top 5 teams with respect to monies donated would win. Or the teams with the most article views win.
2) Another fun competition idea is to have individuals try to get the most views, highest ranking and most articles. The twist is all of this must happen with one niche. The measures would be based on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
Could be interesting times.
Best Regards,
Richard
November 30th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Wow! Looking at all these ideas I see how difficult it must be to put a decent competition together. Smart idea to ask for all the input.
One of the ideas I am really liking is a competiton designed to add new blogs to under served niches. A good contest for adding blogs might give points for any blog added and extra points for blogs added to these under served niches. The blogs would off course be required to meet some quality standard.
November 30th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Competitions are fun, so yes you should have some more.
I strongly believe that any competition should help strengthen the overall value of AMA for all its users.
I have two suggestions for new competions that keep this in mind (in separate posts).
The “Classic” – with a twist.
Basically this is all about adding new sites to AMA, but with a higher focus on valuable sites than earlier competions.
Score:
Basic points are awarded for new sites added to AMA.
½ point per “unranked site”.
1 point per PR 0 site.
2 points per PR 1 site.
4 points per PR 2 site.
6 points per PR 3 site.
10 points per PR 4 site.
15 points per PR 5 site.
25 points per PR 6 site.
40 points per PR 7 site.
Bonus points are awarded for deversity and “quality” of the added sites:
10 points per different Class C IP used.
1 point per 5 Google backlinks to the added domain (max. 20 points total per domain)
Prizes (both Top 10 and random prizes are awarded)
TOP 10 prizes:
1. place: Free lifetime membership to ALL of your products (current and future)
2. – 3. place: Free lifetime membership to ALL your current products.
4. – 10. place. Free lifetime membership to AMA.
Prize Draws:
Random prize drawing between everyone participating with minimum 50 points.
1 prize: Free lifetime membership to ALL you products (current and future)
1 prize: Free lifetime membership to ALL you current products.
5 prizes: Free lifetime membership to AMA.
The competition should run for 60 days.
If needed you could request for competitors to report their own score the day after the competition expired and then only check the top 10 results reported.
Regards
Don
November 30th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
It seems that more experienced/advanced marketers don’t need convincing that AMA is a valuable and effective tool. But newbies may need more help in understanding its value. A competition that would highlight how AMA can help you start if you are starting FROM SCRATCH would be the best testimonial for your product. That is not to say experienced marketers couldn’t/shouldn’t participate…they would use it to showcase a brand new site, possibly in a brand new niche they haven’t tapped into before. The simplest would be a requirement of taking 10 - 20 keywords/phrases and writing x number of articles, then showing how to make those articles unique with your system while keeping the QUALITY of the articles top-notch. I think the focus should be on QUALITY. Maybe you could get some independent judging for that - a few experienced copywriters, teachers, etc.
Again, I don’t think the actual details of the contest (you guys can come up with the rules and regulations) are as important as the concept of what you are trying to show - and that is HOW does AMA help ANY marketer build and improve their business and their bottom line!!!
Thanks.
Tina
November 30th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
BACKLINK DRIVE
This competition is all about adding link-juice to existing domains and posts in AMA.
Competitors are required to build quality backlinks to random AMA sites and pages.
You need to add two small features to the AMA user portal for this completion to be able to run. The new features should be:
A) An opt-in button for the competition. Once clicked the competitor will get a list 50 (or 100) random URL’s from different AMA blogs. Each of the listed URL’s will only be assigned to this one specific competitor. (If possible the list should also have suggestions for anchor text). AMA chooses URL’s to be promoted randomly between all sites that are minimum 3 months old and have posted minimum 20 posts.
B) A opt-out option for people who doesn’t want their blogs to receive links from the competition. (Opt-out should be possible in the 10 days leading up to competition start)
The task for each competitor is now too build quality backlinks to the 50 URL’s he has been assigned.
Naturally, Spamming, Free-For-All sites, Run-Of-The-Site links, Black Hat, Paid Links and similar methods are BANNED from the competition. AMA can NOT be used to build links in this competition! (we don’t want a lot of “internal” links). Social Bookmarking links should probably also be excluded from the competition.
All links should be permanent links and come from sources like Article Directories, Web Directories, Blog posts and commenting, the competitors own websites (NOT those in AMA), Social Network sites, Video sites and similar.
The competitor can build a maximum of 200 links to any AMA URL assigned to him and a minimum of 3 different anchor texts should be used per URL. (And please don’t build all 200 links in 1 day).
Any specific URL that the competitor uses to link to AMA URL’s can max. be used to create 3 links to AMA URL’s in total.
SCORING:
At the beginning of the contest a Yahoo Backlink count is taken for each URL in each competitors set of 50 URL’s.
14 days after the end of the contest a new Yahoo Backlink count is taken for each URL in each competitors set of 50 URL’s (competitor could also be required to report this himself).
1 point for each additional Yahoo backlink is awarded.
Prizes
1. place: Free lifetime membership to ALL you products (current and future)
2. – 3. place: Free lifetime membership to ALL you current products.
4. – 10. place. Free lifetime membership to AMA.
Prize Draws:
Random prize drawing between everyone participating with minimum 100 points.
1 prize: Free lifetime membership to ALL you products (current and future)
1 prize: Free lifetime membership to ALL you current products.
5 prizes: Free lifetime membership to AMA.
The competition should run for 30-60 days.
If needed you could request for competitors to report their own score on a specific date 14 days after the competition expired and then only check the top 10 results reported.
Regards
Don
November 30th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
A wonderful idea!
I agree with Shelly (no 44): Let’s think about the others too. I came up with a similar idea (I really read Shelly’s after I had crafted this one, when I was about to publish it)
My reply to “What will you do with this free article submission period?”
Promote my idea for the competition!
1) We set up a CHARITY GATEWAY site that links to a number Non-Profit Organizations (NPO) i.e. , WWF, Greenpeace, Caritas, Red Cross, and alike.
2) On our charity site a brief description of each of the NPO activities is presented and a link to the corresponding NPO, inviting the visitors to go the NPO site of their choice and donate some money for charity on their respective sites, or if no direct donation is possible, send them to the corresponding contact page.
3) Our charity site should allow for affiliate signup and affiliate ID tracking (tracks the IP address too, in order to avoid duplicates and cheating). The site should make it easy to query and display the total and unique hits, together with the affiliate’s ID and name, on the home page (updated every 5 minutes). For time reasons, this real-time update may have to be implemented in a second phase.
4) This site could remain forever, and ongoing competitions would be resolved on a monthly base.
5) We could have two groups of winners:
a) The first 5 that drive most unique traffic to our charity site in a given period.
b) The first 5 that generate the most backlinks over time (no counter reset).
All winners will be included in the “Hall of Fame” area of the site. All the other participants, as they are contributing to this noble case, can consider themselves winners too. Their monthly contribution will be kept, as well, on a page linked to the “winners of the month” page.
6) Additionally we could setup Google adsense or other publicity and sponsor ads (AMA ;-)) on the site, and invite visitors to click on these ads too. Any income would go into a designated charity account.
Well, there is more that could be done, but this is the basic idea. Once the site is up and running in its first version, the competition can begin. Simple to implement and easy to track backlinks (all go to one site and include the affiliate ID) and referred visits (tracked by the site itself).
–> Who volunteers in helping setting up the site? If I knew how to, I would. There should be some ready-to-go, easily customizable, membership site software available (If you have any suggestions, let us know?). I am very happy to host the site on my hosting account and to collaborate in anything needed to build the site.
To prove that I am serious about this project, I have just now purchased the domain http://www.charity-gateway.org (link not working yet), for 3 years, and in case my shared hosting gets too busy (would be great! ;-)), I will fund the hosting on a dedicated server too. Take my word for it! …Together we can make it!
Lets’ go for …it!
Andre Klein
November 30th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I think that since AMA is a traffic generation system, the contest should be to determine who can get the most out of it. I think the rules should be:
1. Create a new site with a new domain (less than 2 weeks old). Must provide proof of registration date.
2. Site must be in a competative niche picked from a list provided by you guys. That way everone has the same hurdles to overcome.
3. Create unique content on the site (doesn’t even need to be monitized)
4. Add Google Analytics code for tracking
5. Create a predefined number of unique articles and make them spinable for AMA. That way someone can’t get an upper hand because they have more time to create 100 articles while someone else can only do 10.
6. At the end of a predefined period, everyone submits thier traffic totals report from Google Analytics for judging.
7. All contestants must agree not to promote thier sites in any other way beside AMA. Not sure how you can enfore this though.
This contest will test:
1. How well people rewrite PLR content.
2. How well they spin it (do they just spin single words or entire phrases)
3. How well they do keyword research to target the most obtainable keyword and how well they link those keywords back to their site. So people who target just “weight loss” won’t have a chance of winning in the short amount of time.
Simple rules: The top 10 sites based on search traffic totals win.
NOTE: The winner should NOT be based on sale totals because AMA has nothing to do with the quality of the landing pages on people’s sites.
If done right, the contest will provide proof that AMA can take a brand new site and get it top ranking in a competative niche within a short amount of time.
All winners will receive:
1. Free lifetime AMA memberships
2. 3 Months free access to Internet Progression Marketing
Top winner will receive the above AND:
One hour of free coaching from Daniel and/or Marc via Skype.
I think this would be a great contest and I’d love to participate.
Cheers,
Mark
November 30th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
An idea for a competition should be based on demonstrating how effective AMA is.
So the best measure will be to see how many keywords get ranked for a particular site. (Submit the keywords in advance)
1. Build a brand new site or Web 2.0 property like squidoo.
2. Make it a Christmas related offer.
3. Measure with incoming traffic and or conversions to sales. Confirm by showing proof of income.
A great prize would be an AMA membership and some one on one coaching to turbo charge the membership and PLRpro combined.
November 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
An AMA competition is a great idea. With a trial period from AMA, a niche is selected along with approved affiliate program(s). For example, the niche could be Christmas Trees. The winner of the AMA challenge would be the contestant who made the most affiliate commissions from selling Christmas Trees. They can choose whatever: their own domain, web 2.0 site, articles or combination of any or all to promote their properties. And of course the biggest factor here is how to use AMA to promote your sites. When trial members see how easy it is to use AMA, and with some simple techniques like spinning content for uniqueness this competition has the potential to grow the AMA network and make some money for the contestants while learning about IM at the same time.
PS. After all the great food over the holidays, we may want o have a competition niche for exercise equipment come January 1!
Regards
Tom
November 30th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Hi Marc,
Thanks for this opportunity. I believe in quality over quantity, so my own use of AMA will concentrate on quality articles, with a high level of rewrites and high acceptance rate.
I also believe any contest should reward quality and results, but recognize that some people have more time than others. So my recommended competition allows people to enter multiple times, but still lets the person who only enters once have an equal chance to win.
1. What will I do with this free article submission period?
I will ramp up my article marketing and backlink building by submitting at least two quality articles per day.
Each article must be rewritten to result in (a) an article title that is at least 100% rewritten for each refresh, and (2) an article body that is at least 80% rewritten for each refresh.
I will aim for an “accept rate” of at least 90%, and tweak any article that does not achieve this until it is reaching this level.
I will review the “ranking” statistics regularly and work towards continuous and steady improvement in ranking for my targeted keyword phrases. I will also check my web stats to find other keyword phrases on which to write new articles.
2. Do you think we should do a mini competition? If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
Competitions can be difficult to ensure equity because people have varying levels of time to devote. Any competition should, therefore, focus on quality combined with results.
I think a good competition should be that each individual will pick a keyword or phrase that they’d like to rank for in Google’s top ten results.
The keyword/phrase must have a minimum of XX,000 competing sites (keyword in quotes in Google) — the number to be chosen by Marc.
Individuals can rank either a new domain, a new article (eg. on EZA or another site), a blogger site or other third party site (Wordpress, Hub page, Squidoo), as long as they can evidence the date it was established as after the start date of the competition.
Anyone who earns a top 10 Google ranking for their chosen page/site and keyword after a fixed amount of time (as decided by Marc) will be eligible for a random drawing of a free lifetime AMA membership.
Individuals can enter as many times as they wish (for different keywords and target URLs), as long as they meet the minimum competition criteria and have stated at the outset the keyword they are targeting, and URL they are trying to rank. So those people who have the time to submit a higher quantity of articles, have more chances to win. But even someone who only has time to focus on ranking for one keyword has the same opportunity at the end of the day to be selected to win.
The rankings should be achieved only via AMA article submissions.
I believe that this provides an objective competition for people with all skill levels and time availability.
Cheers,
Susan
November 30th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
During the free article submission time, get the most QUALITY articles submitted as possible.
But as far as competition goes, there’s so many directions you could take that!
1) Have a competition for those whose articles get published the most often.
1A) For those that do, make them a featured author somehow, to reward them for their work.
2) See who can rank for the most keyword phrases in their niche.
2A) For those that win, reward them with some robust analytics/ranking software/services for their sites. Something like Raven SEO or a similar product.
3) Have a contest for websites that are brand new and see how quickly they can rank.
3A) Offer a lifetime AMA and/or PLRPRO account.
4) I’d also be curious to see all of the unique ways website owners are using the articles. Once they get an article, what do they do with it? Do they publish it right away or do they schedule it out? Do they add their own links? If so, where? Do they place AdSense ads on their sites? If so, where? How is it working for them?
4A) For the site owner(s) who do publish the articles and have achieved some success with them have them write a report for AMA that gets featured on the site. Helping other website owners who are struggling or who are new.
- Kristine
November 30th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
New to affiliate marketing as of October ‘09 and learning heaps. I am a member of Outsourcing too. AMA is something new and I have just signed in. Look forward to all the wonderful results that I have been reading about.
for extra speed.
A competition sounds cool, even with a newbie status handicap. Nothing like a challenge to accelerate your learning and reap huge benefits.
Now, I will be submiting like crazy during this free article submission period so that the returns will continue to support this wonderful program - may even bribe the teenages to help with the articles
As to a the mini competition itself, it would be nice to have the qualifier be something both the experienced and inexperienced can do and yet have each be challenged. Something that will have continued benefits for all. The rewards could be lifetime membership to AMA and/or individual coaching.
Not sure on the other products that you market but any competition should be specific to developing the skill and strength of using the given product.
Warm regards,
Lynn
November 30th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Phew, quite a lot to read through - don’t envy the person who’ll have to choose, though perhaps that’s been outsourced. (ta da!)
Anyway,
I would try and make the most of the article submission period to improve my sites’ pathetic rankings with the intention that it would eventually at least generate a monthly subscription to AMA. ( perhaps not very ambitious but every journey begins with a small.. etc)
Mini competition - always a good idea, well not always but sometimes, but in this case yes. Good for motivation, fun and publicity.
What should the reward be - well judging by some of the replies 1st prize should be the moon on a stick, 2nd prize a certificate confirming the meaning of life and 3rd prize Marc and Daniel come and sit next to you at your pc for a month to help you out (ok boring myself now).
The level of prize would I guess be dependent on the mini-ness of the competition - membership in AMA makes sense - cold hard cash is always in demand (you can tell that all those marketing ebooks have been well spent). Could have some fun automation related prizes, e.g. a toy robot a la robotsapien, could offer vacuuming robot and some others (I guess postage could be an issue)
What should the competition be? _ this as is obvious from the above comments is more difficult than it might appear. Measuring performance in terms of rankings, page visits, back links or revenue just seems too complicated and open to abuse.
Anyway, all I could come up with was some sort of quantifiable (is SMART still used in planning er circles?) way of assessing your article submissions. So you could have a 2 week period in which to add as many quality articles as possible.
This could be judged by calculating the number of articles times the word length (although this will vary-could just pick one) times the acceptance rate at the end of the 2 weeks. This will reward both the number, length and quality of articles.
Thus AMA=NA*WL*AR, not quite as catchy as E=mc2.
Cheers and happy december everyone (don’t want to offend/exclude) so will embrace the whole of December as a month of peace, love and understanding.
Bob
ps I have a slight cold (ok rabid swine flu) just now which may have affected the ‘quality’ of this comment.
November 30th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
A competition is a Great idea !
How about something like the best rejection ratio per a given number of articles.
Or
The best disribution for a given number of articles.
Or
Combine both with best improvement in search results.
Regards,
George
November 30th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
What a fantastic opportunity this is!
I will use the free article submission period to boost some of my stagnant sites with a view to getting more quality backlinks. I will then sell the sites having enhanced their value.
A mini competition is an excellent idea. I think it should be kept simple and run over a relatively short time period.
Competition Details
1. The competition will be open to all users of AMA.
2. Pick a Christmas-related niche and identify 4 keyword phrases to target, each with global broad match competition of 30,000 to 50,000, to allow search engine rankings in the relatively short time. One niche per entrant.
3. Set up one new self-hosted WordPress blog, optimised for one or more of the 4 keyword phrases.
4. Register the site url and keyword phrases with AMA. AMA will verify that each site is newly-registered with reference to domaintools.com.
5. Get content and backlinks for each blog using AMA - no new submissions after 13.00 EST 24th December 2009.
6. On New Year’s Eve, at a time to be confirmed, AMA will check the global rankings of all registered sites for the registered keywords (broad match and phrase match) on Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
7. Points will be awarded as follows for sites ranking in the top 10 of each of Google, Yahoo! and Bing:
1st Position Broad Match = 20
2nd Position Broad Match = 18
3rd Position Broad Match = 16
…
9th Position Broad Match = 4
10th Position Broad Match = 2
Phrase Match Positions will receive half the number of points of their respective broad match positions.
Points will be totalled for each entrant.
8. 10 prizes will be awarded of life memberships to AMA, one to each of the highest scoring entrants.
An additional prize of 1 year’s membership to AMA will be awarded to each of the highest scoring new sign-up member (who has not won one of the top 10 prizes), and two other entrants drawn at random (who have not already been awarded a prize).
No entrant may win more than one prize.
Regards.
November 30th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
1. What will you do with this free article submission period?
The free article submission period should last for about a week or two, depending on the financial capacity of the site. This will give ample time for everyone and encourage more people to participate and. This will also provide time for advertisement or letting people know that such free submission period/promo exists.
With this free-article submission period, I will be gathering data about the most popular articles and write some of my own high quality articles to submit to AMA. This is a great way to get my websites ranked high in search engines for the website and goes a long way for my long-tern goals. This would also improve the quality of articles that AMA receives and would be submitting better quality articles to registered websites.
2. Do you think we should do a mini competition?
Definitely YES! I love doing competitions. Having a competition will also boost additional popularity to the website. Since article marketing is already being considered as the most successful form of internet advertising, having a competition will not hurt the website when it comes to long-term goals. Since Internet is a very powerful medium, word regarding a competition or contest will boost or increase your membership following.
3. If so what should the reward be and what should the competition be?
One competition I have gave deep thought to would be article writing regarding a product or service that has seen so much speculation already but has not been officially released yet. With this kind of article writing, you would be seeing how writers will use their ingenuity in coming up with an article worth reading by just basing it on research and their own creativity. With the kind of judging that you will have, you would definitely be getting the cream of the crop- exceptional writers with mass appeal. It would also give the product amazing amount of recognition before the product is even released to the market.
Here is a cool (ahem) chart I have created of how this kind of competition could work:
http://www.baldwinkoo.com/images/New_Product.gif
Another competition idea I have came up with is that you give one topic and will give the interested participants limited time to write only one article regarding the subject matter. Your criteria should be very specific (example: 600 words, focusing in only two or three features, benefits, advantages one gets when getting this product or service, etc.), you shortlist like 10 entries and have 2 ways of judging- 50% coming from a panel of judges, and 50% coming from loyal readers. It is both a popularity and quality contest. Your contestants will then be promoting the website as well and and their traffic will increase significantly.
Since more generated traffic means more traffic/leads/sales for those people who utilized the submission directory winners, the winner will be determined by checking the amount of traffic or sales that they have reached during the promo/contest period. There could be ways to check the veracity of results. It could either be by checking who ranks high in Google, or other ways through the use of Google Analytics. Although this may take some time, it would definitly show how much the people behind the competition care.
Best reward will always be monetary and a recognition on the website and a link of the winner’s website. In that way, you are killing two birds with one stone. You are increasing your membership following and at the same time, marketing the winning writer’s website as well.
This would cement your reputation as a very reputable membership website and you are guaranteed a stable traffic for your website. The prize for existing members will likewise be free use of the site’s services. This could be free renewal of membership or extension of membership.
4. Who can get the fastest results through AMA?
The people who use AMA will get the fastest results! The website that is linked to the articles submitted will get fastest result through Automatic Marketing Automation. It is a very cost effective way to promote your service, website, or client; build your traffic and establish your reputation.
December 1st, 2009 at 12:30 am
The goal of this competition is two fold. One is to show the ease in which results are attained when using AMA and the other is to show the value in joining AMA as a paid member.
The nice thing is, if you can show results and compare the results to the cost of ppc ads on the page for which your page rank’s due to using AMA, then it would be easy to see the value in joining AMA as a paid member.
The main reason people haven’t joined yet is simply the unknown. What does one have to “do” in order to attain ranking results using AMA?
I like to keep it simple.
The competition should be who can rank for more #1 keywords that get some volume of traffic than the next guy. This will actually require two skills. One is to find keywords that are longtail (so that they are more easily rankable) and get at least some traffic. The other skill is to use AMA to build the proper anchor text links to the page you want to get ranked.
All contestants must signup and use google analytics, so that the results can be seen for the time period in question.
The smarter contest will pick easier keywords to rank for. All you need to do is be creative and put a good competition & competition rating example forward on what would be a really nice competition you would have fun being part off.
The winner should be getting a lot of traffic at that point? The reward for winning the contest should be one-on-one consultation to take their business to the next level. Whatever the next level is for that person.
Thanks for the opportunity Marc.
- Eric
December 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 am
God is giveing the biggest gift anyone/thing can give…FREEDOM !!! FROM
MONEY!!!
At any cost, sorry, you all brought it on yourselves.
Admin Reply: Sorry doesn’t mesh well with me at all.
Go read Atlas Shrugged it might give you some perception on what Money actually is, its a currency to which you are paid for using your brain to create something or do something that others were not able to yet or as payment for a service which you do extremely well. It is excersising your own god given ability to use your brain for the benefit of others.
God gave you a unique ability given to no other species on earth (if you are inclined to believe in god), that ability is to think and create using your mind and to be rewarded for it without guilt. Perhaps you should check your premise and decide if you are making the most out of what God has given you.