BLOGGING IDOL BEGINS!!

And the fun begins. . .

This is not only my introduction of Blogging Idol, but also my Tuesday Toot! I am stepping out of my comfort zone - that of the Mommy blogs and Mommy contests and I am venturing into the blogosphere by entering into this exciting, challenging and perhaps silly-for-a-mommy-blog competition.

First of all - what is Blogging Idol you ask? No, Paula, Simon and Randy are not sitting at their computers with their red cups of Coke lurking around the blogosphere and voting who can stay and who can go. Instead, Daniel Scocco of Daily Blogging Tips came up with this contest. Here is his objective of this contest:

The idea
Basically I want to create a competition where any blogger with 1000 subscribers or less can enter. People can also create brand new blogs just for the competition. Those bloggers will then compete for one month, and we will track the initial and the final number of subscribers (as reported from Feedburner), and the blogger who manages to gain the largest number of new subscribers in that period will be declared the Blogging Idol, and will win the money prize.

The 1000 subscribers cap will be used to exclude larger blogs and pro bloggers. It would not be fair after all if guys with brand new blogs were to compete with someone that already has 10,000. For the latter, adding hundreds of new subscribers in the course of one month is not a difficult task.

The objective of the contest is to give new bloggers an opportunity to compete with others and to prove their ability on blogging and online marketing. At the same time, it should also allow everyone to see what techniques and strategies will work, the ones that will not, with real examples behind everything.

Each week I will need to report in as to what strategies I used to attract new subscribers to my blog. While I'm hopeful that I will be able to gain lots of subscribers because of my charm, wit and wisdom, I somehow think that won't grab too many people (I mean so far I only have lured in 17 subscribers!) and I will have to potentially resort to bribery. . .what kind, I don't know, but I'm sure we will have some fun contests and giveaways over the next month to entice readers to become subscribers!

What is that you are saying? You are excited about this competition and want to know how you can help me? Here goes. . .you can:

1) Subscribe to my blog (via the blank spot that asks for your email on the top left hand side of my sidebar) if you don't already

2) Ask all of your friends to visit my blog and have them subscribe - and then perhaps you can even ask your friends friends to do the same

3) If you have a business/blog/website that you want to promote and you want to do a giveaway (be it a service, item or gift certificate) that I can use to bribe (no, I'm not being shy about what I might need to do to win!) people to sign up , please email me at mommymeryl@gmail.com. Hopefully we can create a win-win - you get publicity for your donation and get traffic to your website/blog and I get people to subscribe to my blog because of your item that we enticed them with - works for me, how about you?