Sam Diener. One of the best social media bloggers. Proven.

Hey all.   I don’t often brag.   But this time I will.

In writing, I really haven’t had a real opportunity to show how good or bad I really was.   So when the opportunity came up to enter a blogging contest, as dorky as it made me feel, I decided, why not!

So I entered the Community Marketing Blog’s #Blog-Off 2. If nothing else, it was an opportunity to prove to myself whether I had any real skill at online marketing, and copy-writing.

Competitors were well-established names and faces from the blogging and internet marketing world, including names from the Huffington Post, and those that had been in the space for years.   With my humble 5 months of experience, I guess I looked silly.   But then again, I had Kellie Bowers (my editor) and the fact that I had my 30,000 visitors.  And an ever increasing following.   Yeah, okay, search for Sam Diener on Google and see what comes up.

The problem was that of my following, is not a social media following.   I don’t blog about social media stuff.   I blog about “Stuff for Success-” which, for the most part, has nothing to do with social media.   So what do I do?   I have to generate a following on a random topic in under 2 weeks.  Oh well.   Let’s give it a try.

So in any case, for the contest, I start to write about social media, namely Linked-In, Twitter, Facebook, and SEO, and I find out that the rules have changed to the point that I could have continued to write my articles on the topics I entertain here.   But, I had already written my first post, so I wasn’t about to change.

Back to the contest, I wrote 2 posts,

Why are Linked-In and Twitter So…. Small? and
6 Things SEO Experts Won’t Tell You, But I Will (The SEO Lies)

And as you can see, they are not related at all to my usual writing.   Overall, here were some contest statistics:

- Blog-Off II ran from December 1st – 12th, 2009
- 28 people entered the contest from 5 countries
- 7 judges from 3 countries volunteered to asses competitors
- 10+ businesses sponsored over $45,000 in prize value
- 110 blogs were posted on a wide variety of topics
- Over 27,700 page views were generated during the contest
- Visitors stayed from 1.61 minutes to over 6 minutes
- 1,262 new comments were generated between readers and writers
- Readers came from over 30 countries

And I generated, for my Linked-In article, almost 3,000 reads, with an average time of 4 minutes and 36 seconds on the site. Massive discussion with 117 comments was generated.  For my SEO article, I generated, 2,100 reads, with an average of 5 minutes and 55 seconds on the site.   Once again, more huge amounts of discussion, with 106 comments.

The SEO article was republished all over the internet, and actually is currently helping me get more than one consulting opportunity.

And I won second place.   In a niche I never write about.  I thought that was pretty okay.

There are plenty of people that I met, and I want to thank them for their inspiration and community, including all of the Judges, Sean Hall, Janet Barclay, Lucia Brawley, Tim Ruffner, Andrew Ballenthin, Conrad Hall, and Laurie Dillon-Schalk, and the other contestants.