3rd SEM Scholarship Contest by Marketing Pilgrim and My Result

The result for the 3rd SEM Scholarship Contest of Marketing Pilgrim finally has been declared. And sorry to say that I didn’t win the scholarship. However, I am glad that I have made myself (my article) into the 5 finalists, competing with 31 other capable Internet Marketers. I believe this is a great achievement from Bangladesh with literally 1/3rd electricity availability time (in peak hours) and 1/16th of internet speed than USA.

The winner is Linda Bustos for her article: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do to Mess up Their Analytics. Congratulations Linda! Her article was really a masterpiece, which won her many votes from the judges. I came in as 2nd Runner Up both in terms of votes and traffic separately. But, votes and traffic combined I am the 4th among these 5 finalists. And, here is the result:

The good news is, I have the highest Time on Page (4 min 36 seconds). So, that makes my article getting the most time attention from the visitors. I am not sure, but that should mean more conversion (sales), shouldn’t it? ;-)

This traffic report was not provided to the participants before the result was published. However, I had the confidence that I would make it to the final 5. Obviously, I knew what I was doing and how that can affect my traffic. However, some figures also have assured me to stay on this belief. e.g. I had the highest number comments with highest number of visitor comments. Here are some of the figures:

All Figures are for Comments made Before June 30, 2008

Article	Total Comments	Author Comments	Trackback Comments	Visitor Comments
8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To...	49	9	18	22
A Bulletproof SEO Strategy for Real ...	30	2	5	23
13 Prophecies of Internet Marketing	52	4	14	34
The Process of Producing Web Traffic …	16	2	2	12
New Technique for Optimizing Flash Sites ...	16	2	2	12

If want to see them graphically, then here you go:

I was also convinced by the number of results in Google for the exact term of the Article Titles. For the exact Article Title term in Google, the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) showed highest 929 Web Results in Google (at July 13, 2008). Please have a look at the number of results Google possesses for each of the 5 finalists:

I would like to give special thanks to all the people in my network, especially in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Orkut. I would also like to specially thank those who have taken the initiative to blog for my article. It was really a tough time for me, but I really had great fun.

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Philanthropists are the greatest marketers