A Challenge To My SEO Manhood – An SEO Contest

by TJ

Joey Bacon from Inferno New Media has challenged me to a duel, and I have gladly accepted.

We are both looking to push ourselves to explore new ideas and money making opportunities online.  We sat at AK’s Coffee in Opelika (our usual hangout) last Friday, tossing around ideas.  Joey proposed that we have a small little contest to provide the motivation we need to finish some of these small ideas we are tossing around and make some money off of them. 

The Rules
There are a total of 100 points up for grabs in any given month.  The contest starts today, April 1st and lasts until December 31st 2009. 

Building a good website is not all about money.  However, it is mostly about money.  You need to make a living right?  You have to have money to build and expand a website, so it should at least be self-sustaining.  60% of this contest (60 points) will be given out based on the running profit total for the site(s) in either of our portfolios. 

40% will be given out based on unique organic traffic for the given month (not a running total).

All domains used in this contest must be registered on or after April 1rst (registered my first at midnight).  Any existing programs and/or scripts can be used or you can custom write scripts.  If you already have paid for them in the past or if you can obtain them for free, they will not count against your initial investment. 

A maximum of $10 can be spent out of pocket during this competition.  That means that once you register a domain (cost me $7.69) you can only spend a couple of dollars until you make some money.  This forces you to use skill instead of just relying on PPC initially.

Scoring will be as follows:

  • Profits:  If I make $5 profit and joey makes $2 profit, then $7 were made.  I made 5/7 or 71% and Joey made 2/7 or 29%.  I would get 71% of the 60 points (43) and Joey would get the remaining 17 points. 
  • Traffic will be handled the same way.  If I have 300 unique visitors, and Joey has 400 I would get 300/700 of the 40 points (17) and joey would get the remaining 23. 

In the above example, I have a total of 60 points to Joey’s 40.  I win!

Reward
The winner in any given month gets 10% of the losers take from that particular month.  In the above example, Joey would owe me a whopping $0.20.  Hopefully these are low numbers but I don’t expect much in the first month or two.

I’ve got my idea together and have registered the domain, I’ll keep you updated on the progress.