As you all know the “Blogging Tips 101 Contest” started on 1st January, 2012. The contest in is its peak now. The last date for the submission of contest entries was/is 31st January, 2012 and I’ve got all submissions.

The contest participants, whose post are published are already geared up and doing a great job. And as of now, I have got posts scheduled until 15th February, 2012. I saw that mostly I scheduled posts only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. These are my usual blog updating days on Problogging Success.

So I thought I’d stick to that. Plus I want each contest post to get at least one day exposure before the next post comes on top. And this is why I also avoided publishing contest posts on weekends; the amount of exposure could be lesser.

Change in important dates

Things didn’t go as I planned, and that’s for good. Since now the last contest post will be published on February 15th here are the new important dates for the contest.

1. Contest post submission is now closed.

2. Social promotion of the contest posts close on 28-02-2012. Only social scores will be locked at this date.

3. Until March 15th, you can still earn points by writing reviews and building backlinks. However you need not wait until 28th February to do these, you can start writing reviews and building backlinks right from the day you got my approval to get your post published as a contest entry.

4. Results will be announced around 20th March and I expect to release the prizes between 25 and 31st March.

The time zone considered will be EST. So any deadline means the corresponding date, 11:59pm, according to EST (Thanks Allie, for bringing this up!).

Please make note of the new dates and plan your winning strategies accordingly.

This and that

Let me answer some of the most common things I get asked about regarding the contest.

1. Please do not email me and ask to be included in the contest hereafter. This is a contest which has a last date. So I have to abide by the rules, even if I’m conducting it All I can give you is a negative reply (and I hate to do that more frequently!).

2. Everyone is competing for a prize, so play fair. Do not try to manipulate social scores. I know you can buy a bunch of social shares (tweets, Facebook likes or Google +1s) on Fiverr or somewhere, but I will cut them out.

3. You are free to ask your friends to support you by sharing your posts or even you may ask them to comment on your behalf for backlinks (leaving comments on other blogs with commentluv backlink to your contest entry).

4. But do not bribe anyone (by offering a premium product, a discount, or anything that carries a price tag) to help you out. You cannot win a contest with money.

5. When writing sponsor reviews, please make sure you ask me if in doubt about what to review. Some sponsors have clear requirements (like the Platinum Sponsor weightlosstriumph.com, for instance) for reviews. While others have not clearly mentioned - for instance you may wonder whether to review Annabel’s book or the blog itself when writing a review. Ask me, or the sponsor directly if possible.

6. Please note that you need to write an “about the contest” post and publish it on your blog. This only makes your contest entry eligible. If you fail to do it, even if your post gets published and even if you climb up the point ladder you won’t be eligible to receive a prize. In the “about the contest” post you need to include links to all the sponsors. You can grab the HTML code for sponsor links here - http://www.probloggingsuccess.com/blogging-tips-101-contest-sponsors/ (scroll down to the end to see the code). If you’re in doubt about what to write in that post, look at some of the “about the contest” posts written by others given in this table - http://www.probloggingsuccess.com/blogging-tips-101-contest-current-trends/.

7. You can check out the current trends of the contest here - http://www.probloggingsuccess.com/blogging-tips-101-contest-current-trends/. This page will show you the current status of the points ladder and whose is in what position, and all that. Plus you can also find the sponsor reviews written so far.

8. However please note that the contest trends page is updated manually by me and hence the trends are not real time. I do the updates once in 2 or 3 days depending upon how busy and healthy I am (currently I’m battling a tough flu). So please do not email me asking to update the score or questioning about any un-updated scores. If you found any wrong or irrelevant information, you can surely poke me :).

9. I can automatically count and update social shares. But for backlinks and sponsor reviews, you need to email me the links. Immediately after your post is accepted for the contest you’d have received an email from me about how to notify me on backlinks and sponsor reviews. If not, please let me know and I’ll send it to you.

10. On backlinks, only links from other domains count. If you are replying to comments in your contest entry, or if you are replying to another blog post at Problogging Success with a commentluv link to your contest post, it won’t be counted as a backlink. That is, if your backlink is from www.probloggingsuccess.com, it doesn’t count.

That’s all, now let’s chill out and enjoy the rest of the contest Good luck to all participants.