Your Feedback on Mother's Day Blog Contest

Dear IL Bloggers,

As most of you are aware, we recently conducted our Mother's Day Blog contest. During the contest, I received feedback from a few IL bloggers and want to use that to take things forward. The feedback was around two main points.

1. We should not have invited external bloggers to participate in the first place. The contest should have been restricted only to IL Bloggers.
2. Selection of winner by voting was not the right approach. We should have used a panel to select the winner.

One of our objectives of that contest was to get IL's name out there in the wider blogging world. When we do that, readers of external blogs will come to IL and read our blogs/forums and become regular visitors(members) here. That is why we structured it the way we did.

The main point though was that our monthly blog contest - Finest Blog Contests are done already EXACTLY inline with the above two feedback. It is only open to IL bloggers and it is decided by a panel (run very similar to the Finest Post Contests we have for Forum Posts).

However, it has been hard to get regular nominations for the Finest Blog Contests!! Now, I need all of your help in nominating good IL blogs (from our IL Blogs section) every month for the Finest Blogs Contest.

To motivate nominations for the monthly Finest Blog Contests, we have made the following minor changes.

1. To get more visibility, we have moved the "Finest Blogs of IL" sub-forum under "Contests and Winners".
2. In addition to nominating blog entries, you (or anyone) can even nominate best comments received for the blog entries. So, if you see a insightful comment in your blog or in someone else's blog too, please nominate that as well.

Many of you closely followed the Mother's Day contest and sent me several comments/feedback on it. I want the same enthusiasm and energy to this monthly Finest Blog Contest. Make it successful!

Dear IL,

First of all congratulations to you for coming up with such a hit, the " Mother's Day Blog Contest". IL surely has achieved a greater popularity because of it and great writers have achieved recognition.

The idea of moving blog contest in " Contest and Winners" is absolutely perfect.. This will attract more readers to participate in the contest..

So, I appreciate this and hope we get more nominations for the best entries this time..

Thanks..

I second the views of Deepali. IL reached more persons thru this blog contest.

The idea of nominating the comments also is another step in popularizing the blogs.

I am welcoming it.


andal

Malathy,
I appreciate the motive of the Mother's day blog contest.But one thing i noticed during voting is the vast gap of votes between IL bloggers and external bloggers.Is this because of more internet users aware of other blog links when compared to IL blogs?Not sure.Here i am not talking about the quality of the blogs written.All the blogs deserve applaude.

Hi Supriya,

I think there are several factors.

One point is what you mention. Individual blogs in IL are not as well known as some of these external blogs. The Mother's Day contest is mainly to rectify that and help increase the readership of our blogs. Also see - 10 Ways to Build Readership for your Blog

The most important observation I had is the following. The winners (in fact most of the external bloggers) put in substantial effort to ring in the votes. They realized that the contest is structured such a way that winning lies not just in writing a good post, but also in effective networking. Please see below what Tharini (our 2nd place winner) did to bring in votes.

"I have never considered myself too much of a networking person, so to write to people asking for their votes and that of their friends, really took me out of my element in a big way, which is good from time to time. The funnest part of it was how the whole family got involved. Starting with my bro and sis, who were my first recruits, and who went all out to ring in the votes. To my FIL, who was my most avid supporter and diligently got in touch with all of his contacts with a personal email, to Pops, who got his student population to vote, to the 6 AM phonecall from my MIL who was concerned as to why the vote button was disabled in the middle; To those sweet friends and readers whom I bullied to be my campaign managers, with their quota of votes to deliver; to all my address book and facebook friends whom I must have messaged several times with the word 'voting' in the subject line! It was all fun."