www.affiliateconfession.com

The University Kid is holding the mother of all blog contests over at his blog and the list of prizes is about as long as the Empire State Building is tall. In total, I believe there are 255 prizes. (I’m not completely sure of that number because of the way prizes are being given out.) The prizes total into the thousands of dollars worth and amongst them are more than 15,000 Entrecard credits being given away to one lucky person. That will buy you a ton of advertising. Affiliate Confession donated 1,000 of those Entrecard credits.

There are so many prizes being given away in Jason’s contest that if you enter, you stand a very good chance of winning something. He is basing the winners on a points system and the more you do according to the rules, the more times you actually get entered into the contest. Some of the prizes include Wordpress themes, an SEO ebook, lots of blog advertising besides the Entrecard Credits, blog reviews, consulting, cash prizes and much more.

Jason of The University Kid, TUK, has some high hopes for the results of this humongous contest. At the start of it, TUK had approximately 250 rss readers and is looking to increase that total by 200 additional readers. The number of rss readers you have is one of the best ways to judge the reach and worth of your blog, so this is a top notch goal and one that all bloggers should seek to do, even if they aren’t running a contest.

The rules are pretty simple to enter the contest. Everything is based on a points system and you can earn from 1 to 6 points for leaving comments, subscribing to The University Kid’s rss feed through email, blogging about the contest and more. Jason will pick all the winners on April 15th by entering all email addresses of contest entrants according to how many points they’ve accumulated into the Random.org List Randomizer and then selecting winners one by one. 

If you are interested in winning one of the many valuable prizes to help boost your blog traffic or just earn some easy cash, then head over to the contest post at The University Kid and get entered.

Best of luck to everyone.

Alan
PS - Sorry about not getting to the rest of the BANS tutorials, they will resume Monday. My dad had open heart surgery on Thursday and I haven’t had much time on the computer to blog and do research.

Affiliate Confession is changing. As I write this post there is a new custom design being created for the blog and as you can see to the left the designer I’ve hired is getting his hands wet and is hard at work. The BloggingPro theme worked good to get things up and running and bring in readers, but it’s time for this blog to take the next step.

There are thousands of free WordPress themes available on the net, but if you want to distinguish yourself from the crowd, you must get a unique and custom design. I found this out by scouring the web looking at probably a few thousand free templates and none of them seemed to appeal to me. There were several that looked pretty decent and I thought about trying to tweak a bit, but I know just enough CSS and php to keep from drowning and I’d probably end up destroying the template.

All the major blogs like Problogger, John Chow, Shoemoney, TechCrunch, CopyBlogger and others have custom themes. You know exactly where you are when you visit their blogs because they don’t look like anyone else’s blog, they look unique. That’s part of branding yourself as a blogger and being immediately recognizable to your visitors. Even for the visitors that bounce off your blog coming from the search engines or other sources, they may bounce 10 times before they stick, but when they do stick, they won’t confuse you for any of the other 5,000 blogs that have the same theme you do.

Getting a custom theme done is not cheap, but at some point in your blogging journey you may decide it is necessary.

It was necessary for Affiliate Confession several weeks ago.

Alan