Today kicks off the second annual Blog Off competition at Community Marketing Blog.
Andrew Ballenthin, the founder and organiser, tells me there are 20 confirmed competitors and maybe a couple late comers. There is one person from Huffington Post competing, another newbie (Sam Diener) who has been blogging for just a few months – he’s already built an audience of more than 20,000.
There are two objectives to Blog Off 2
- Show the power of social media to build community
- Demonstrate how to measure social media ROI
To do that, competing bloggers have 12 days to engage their audience, develop traffic and get conversations happening. During those 12 days, they have to make at least 2 posts and are allowed a maximum of 8 posts.
They’re being graded on:
- Captivating blog headlines – how good are they?
- Quality – what is the originality, depth and quality of writing?
- Traffic – how many page visits were you able to generate for your content?
- Dialog – how many people commented and how did you respond?
- Length of visit – did your audience stay engaged?
Since your blog should be the center of your social media marketing efforts, you can see how valuable it is to watch these bloggers at work.
Head on over to the Community Marketing Blog and see what’s happening. You’ll also see posts by me, but I’m not competing. I’m a sponsor for Blog Off 2, so I can’t compete. My role is to report on what’s happening, coach the writers toward better results and write posts that help to connect all the new content.
Catch my reports on Technorati. There will also be longer articles on Blog Critics, and naturally I’ll be writing about the competition here.
Wish me well, and thanks for reading. Now head on over to the Community Marketing Blog.