www.affiliateconfession.com

I’ve been teasing everyone for about a month now as to the super secret project I’ve been working on and the results are finally in. What is it? What’s the big deal?

I’m surprised no one figured it out because I’ve blogged about it 6 times here at Affiliate Confession. I just received notice that I was one of the winners in the Webmaster Talk forums contest where 5 fortunate contestants received a prize package valued at $5,000 and one of the prizes in that pack was a brand new Macbook Air!

What made this contest different than many other contests run on the web was that although you received points for performing certain actions, instead of receiving more chances or entries as you earned points, your points were cumulative and the top 5 people with the most points were to be the winners. Contestants could earn anywhere from 2 to 200 points for various actions ranging from posting to the forums, writing articles and various things in between. My strategy was to maximize the chances of winning by writing a ton of articles and I managed to amass a total of 8,548 points bringing me in at the number 5 slot, only 36 points in front of the number 6 slot. The contest ran for 33 days so there was plenty of time to earn all the points you wanted by just working at it.

I’ll write another post later in the week detailing more of my strategy for winning the contest and what I did to almost assure a place in the top 5 winners. So the secret is out, that’s what I’ve been working on so diligently for the last month. However, now it’s time to get back into the swing of things again and get some real work done. More on the contest later.

EarnersForum.com and Webmaster Talk are merging and having an incredible contest to celebrate the merge. Prizes are valued at more than $25,000 and there will only be 5 winners, but the cool thing is, is that each of the 5 winners gets the same exact cache of prizes. We’re talking serious prizes here, not just a $50 WalMart gift card.

The biggest prize going to each of the 5 winners is a MacBook Air valued at $1,800. Would you be willing to take one of those? But there’s more, including:

A Professional Edition Interspire Shopping Cart valued at $995.
A Max Bounty affiliate network account with $500 cash in it.
A Text-Link Ads $500 gift certificate
An iPod Touch from Rocket Profit
$250 cash in a PepperJam affiliate account
24 custom printed t-shirts from Ndesigns
A Flip camera, great for video blogging from Advaliant
A complete multi-pack Revolution Theme
A Nintendo DS Lite from RevResponse
And a 3 month membership to Aaron Wall’s Seo Training

Now this is a different contest than most because you have control over whether you win or not. In other words, winners will not be chosen by a random drawing, they will be determined by who earns the most points, so go for it.

The full rules are here and you can join the forum here. Good luck!

Technorati Tags: macbook air, apple, ipod touch, walmart

The Craziest Internet Marketing Contest Ever ended yesterday and the winners were picked in a marathon Excel spreadsheet session by Gyutae Park early this morning. I can’t imagine having to figure out all the points everyone accumulated. The good news however, is that I won a very substantial prize in the contest, a 3 month membership, valued at $300, to Aaron Wall’s SEO Training Program which includes a copy Aaron’s SEO Book, the authority on SEO. I though I would have had a good chance to win an H2 Hummer, but that turned out to be an April Fool’s joke, which I hate to admit that I fell for.

I’ve checked out Aaron’s site before and had it in the back of my mind to spend more time there, but since there’s only so much space in my brain I can rent out at one time, I’ve never really gone beyond a superficial look. Now I have a good excuse to spend some serious time looking into SEO and learning it. This has definitely been a weakness of mine since most of what I’ve learned has been the basic, write good content, meta keywords, meta description, keyword in the title and keyword on the page stuff. Honestly, I think if I read another article that tells you to use these 4 or 5 things and then your site will be SEO’d, I’m going to scream. There’s more to it than that.

I have a couple of vacation related sites that do very well with affiliate programs and Google Adsense with the little traffic they get. If I could get 1,000 to 2,000 people per day to each of these sites, I could probably retire and do nothing but write this blog. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing with these sites and I’d like to find out what it is beside that meta tag thingy. Hopefully, I’ll learn some info through Aaron’s training program. I’ll be blogging about what I learn and the results I get through the training, but only to the extent that I won’t be giving away any proprietary info.

I am so looking forward to getting into this.

Getting into contests on the web has proven to be quite successful lately. I’ve probably won more by entering blog contests in the last 3 or 4 months than I have in the previous years of my life. I’ve always held out for the $10 million prize from Publisher’s Clearinghouse, but I’ll take what I can get. A $300 prize suits me just fine, especially when it has the potential to earn me a lot more than that.

On another note I want to say congratulations to Michael Zebold of Real Estate Loop who won the prize I sponsored in Gyutae’s Winning The Web contest. Michael will be getting two months of free advertising on my sidebar with a 125 x 125 banner. I’ve sent Michael an email and he can contact me here as well to set things up.

Congratulations to all the other winners including those who won some sweet cash prizes of $50 to $650. It might be a good thing to let the contest mania subside in the blogosphere for a while before the next one, since this latest contest will be hard to top, unless you really do have an H2 Hummer to give away or maybe a MacBook Air, Shoemoney?