December 26 is here, which means today I am going to announce the two winners of the Xmas ReTweet Contest.

Each of the winners will have the possibility of choosing one of the Premium WordPress Themes available in the WordPress category at ThemeForest as their prize.

Complete list of participants

Below you’ll find the complete list of participants (39) that had valid contest entries (followed both steps in order to enter the competition):

1. Bloghita - @bloghita
2. Marius. - @Marius__
3. Radu Panciuc - @panciuc
4. Eugen - @pauneugen
5. Nikolaevi4 - @Nikolaevi14
6. JeremyOLED - @JeremyOLED
7. Aldo - @iFeelanceWeb
8. Kimberly Castleberry - @KimJCastleberry
9. AlexT - @alext_1020
10. Razvan Girmacea - @RazvanGirmacea
11. Cristian VADUVA - @Vaduva
12. Youwei - @Youwei
13. Calítoe.:. - @Calitoe
14. Daniel - @danielpeisar
15. Anand Srinivasan - @knewthis
16. Margaret Ayad - @eracose
17. Nice from Thailand - @SE7ENize
18. Jennifer - @grizzarkhov
19. Dimitry Ekzarkhov - @design_deity
20. Tracy - @mattnem05
21. Dhaunae @Dhaunae
22. Jessica Dooley - @jessicadooley
23. Jason - @jasontromm
24. elmot - @elmot
25. Kat - @simplywp
26. Codrut @ Blog Post Ideas - @CodrutTurcanu
27. Damir - @wisehat79
28. Melvin - @melvinblog
29. Prasanth Chandra - @pcsbox
30. Jacob Yap - @jacobyap
31. Raju - @rajupp
32. naz - @aenaz
33. Suhas - @suhastech
34. Siddanth
35. Slipdisc - @Roadrippersid
36. technbohowl - @technohowl
37. Rich - @fireitup4USA
38. Michael Cannon - @SMARTcutGeek
39. Kushal Chen - @slayershanks

Contest winners

Here are the lucky winners:

2. Marius. – @Marius__ and
23. Jason – @jasontromm

The 2 winners have been selected using the random number generator available at Random.org. See screenshots below for the winner drawing process:

Xmas Contest – Setting up the draw

Xmas Contest – Draw Results

Claiming your prize

Marius & Jason, I will contact you both via the email addresses you have used to place your comments (contest entries) and we’ll set up the prize selection and delivery. Congratulations!

I would also want to thank everyone else who participated in this fun Christmas contest. The number of entries has surpassed my expectations. If it were possible, I’d gladly give a prize to each and every one of you. But fear not, there will be more contests, so stay tuned to Blogsessive through the blog or my twitter account: @Blogsessive

Happy Holidays!

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How long has it been since I’ve held the last contest on Blogsessive? Too long, but since holidays are close, lets have some fun and make two of you folks the owners of a brand new premium WordPress theme from ThemeForest. It is a simple contest and everyone owning a Twitter account is invited to join in!

Xmas Contest Prizes

Two of the contest participants will each win a premium WordPress theme of their choice from ThemeForest. Contest prize selection is restricted to the WordPress category on the previous mentioned website.

The two winners will be randomly picked by me on the day of December 26th. Read the rules below.

Xmas Contest Rules

Do you own a Twitter account? If so, there are two things you need to do in order to enter this contest:

First you will have to retweet an exact copy of the following:

Win a Premium #WordPress theme in @Blogsessive’s Xmas Retweet Contest! http://bit.ly/XmasRT Click to enter!

Second, after you’ve retweeted the above message, come back here and post a link to the Twitter status containing the retweet in this post’s comments section.

Important:

Entries are valid ONLY if both steps have been followed exactly. Participants are allowed one entry per Twitter account!

Xmas Contest Results

The contest results will be made publicly available on December 26th. I will contact the winners via the email addresses they will use to leave comments on this post, so make sure you comment with a real valid email address in order to claim your prize.

Good luck to you all and let the fun begin!

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At the end of September, I announced a group writing project & contest on Blogsessive. The contest ended on September 30th, and today I’m happy to announce the final results.

Grand Prize Winner

The winner of the identity design package, “Personal license” for the Edge premium WordPress theme and 500 business cards is Rarst (Andrey Savchenko) from Rarst.net. Congratulations and thanks Andrey for an inspired and inspiring post!

The winning post is: Recipe for engaging post.

Honorable Mentions

Mine and jury’s appreciation and 250 business cards go for each of the two runner-ups:

• “A 60 Second Guide to Engaging Your Readers” by Joanna Young of ConfidentWriting.com
• “Whose Smile Warms Your Heart?” by Brad Shorr of WordSellInc.com

Full List of Participants

Here is the complete list of entries received for this project, including the three winners:

• How Other Bloggers Engage Me
• How to connect with your readers
• How to engage with your blog readers
• Recipe for engaging post
• Whose Smile Warms Your Heart?
• A 60 Second Guide to Engaging Your Readers
• How to engage your blog readers?

Thank you all for participating in this project. It has been a pleasure reading all your entries!

Also, I must thank again those that supported this project, Blog Design Studio and U Printing, Jacob Share of GroupWritingProjects.com and the jury members: Alina Popescu and Tibi Puiu.

In the next few days I’ll be contacting personally each of the winners to set up the prize delivery.

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Update: Contest is closed. It’s time for the jury to play its part. All entries will be made public with the contest winners announcement post, next Monday. Thanks to everyone who submitted their entries to this group writing project. It will be a very interesting reading!

The end of September brings a killer contest on Blogsessive under the form of a group writing project for all blog owners, and, since this is a killer contest, your skill can win you some killer prizes. Here’s what the contest winner will get:

1. One identity package – logo, business card and letterhead design – by yours truly;
2. One “Personal license” for the Edge premium WordPress theme, created by Blog Design Studio that as you probably have guessed, offers blog design services;
3. 500 business cards printed using your newly won design by U Printing, company that offers business cards and business cards printing services.

Also, there will be 2 consolation prizes, each of 250 business cards by the same U Printing.

What is a group writing project and how to participate?

A group writing project brings together bloggers with the same interests, all writing and publishing blog posts on a given theme/topic. The topic is usually decided by the one that initiated the project, which is me in our case.

Everyone who wants to join, has to publish a blog post until a specified deadline. This group writing project will end on September 30th, which will be the last day that we’ll accept submissions.

The Topic: How to connect with (engage) your blog readers

I’ve talked about engaging writing before, so you can take a quick look and see what’s this about, but I strongly suggest that you write your own posts. Do not recycle, do not rewrite, do not use old posts from your blog or other people’s materials!

How to submit your entry?

You can submit your contest entry by using Blogsessive’s contact form and following these requirements:

• From the subject drop-down box select “Group Writing Project”;
• Fill in your name and a valid email address(!);
• In the website field insert the link the blog post to be considered as a contest entry. Do not put your home page there;
• In the message field you can tell us a few words about yourself.

Contest entry validation

For your entry to be considered valid it has to follow the above steps and also contain an exact reproduction of the following paragraph (copy-paste works) at the end of the post:

This is an entry for Blogsessive’s Group Writing Project & Contest. Supported by U Printing – Business Cards and Blog Design Studio.

No need to display it in a block quote as above, only the text contained in it. If you think it’s easier to copy and paste exact code, here’s the piece of code to add to your posts:

I know that some people disregard this type of links, but consider this: the above prizes sum up to about $1000 and sponsors should have their gain in this, for you to benefit more. And also…

3 more reasons to join

If the above contest prizes are not enough, here are 3 more reasons to join in:

1. At the end of the project, a list with all valid entries will be published on Blogsessive with do follow links and also, GroupWritingProjects.com will publish the contest results;
2. At the end of the project you’ll a more experienced blogger, with a better understanding of your readers’ behavior and you will discover more ways in which you can connect with them.
3. Write a great post and other participants and readers will most likely talk about it and link to it on their own blogs.

Again, the rules in brief

To recapitulate:

1. Write a good post on “How to engage your readers”;
2. Include the required paragraph as required above;
3. Publish it until September 30th and use the contact form to announce your entry;

Winner and the jury

There will be only one winner of the big prize and 2 consolation prizes, as stated in the beginning of this post. All entries will be analyzed and graded by the contest jury and those with the highest grades will be elected winners.

The jury members:

• Alex Cristache (me);
• Alina Popescu of Words Of A Broken Mirror;
• Tibi Puiu of Lost Art Of Blogging;

As me and the other jury members are all anxious to read your wonderful entries on such an interesting topic, I encourage you to head to your writing space and give it your best, because the prizes are well worth it! Good luck and inspiration, friends!

A big thanks goes out to Jacob of Group Writing Projects for his help in spreading the word about this!

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Recently I’ve been involved in blog contest and the situation I’ve been put in was anything but pleasant. I’m not going to use names since all I want to do is to tell you what you should be aware of when running or sponsoring a contest. The following story is an example on how not to run a blog contest.

The story

Since I’ve started Blogsessive I got in touch with a lot of people that share similar interests with me and so I came to “virtually” meet the character in my story. I must admit that I enjoy the way he writes and the energy he seamed to put in the things he got involved in.

Based on that, when I learned that he launched a new project and held a contest to create a bit of buzz in the blogosphere, I offered my help as a sponsor with one of the things I really enjoy doing – logo design. And not one logo, but four identity packages containing logo, business card and letterhead design. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how expensive such things are when they don’t come as a prize.

All good, contest was launched and after a first episode, a winner out of four was picked. Wanting to not lose time, I contacted the guy asking for the winner’s contact details to get in touch and give her the prize. The answer I received was:

Sure, I’ll send them in a few minutes.

And that was the last I heard from him, no matter how many attempts to get in touch I made. Also, the information about the contest failed to show up on his blog either.

So, there I was, sponsoring a contest that died due to bad management and communication, with a winner that was expecting a prize and with a huge possibility of having my name put in a bad light.

Seeing that no matter what I did, I couldn’t get an answer, I’ve decided to do a bit of research and finally contacted the winner myself and offered her the prize, which she loved.

Consider this

Whenever you decide to hold a contest, remember that whatever you do – good or bad – will also affect your sponsors, and no sponsor wants to be in the spotlight because of you lack of interest in how the contest is managed.

Luckily, in my situation everything got sorted out, but not thanks to the guy I initially wanted to help.

And speaking of contests…

Make sure you check back on Blogsessive next Monday (of course you could visit daily) as I’m starting this months contest. I’m only going to tell you what the prizes are:

• Logo, business card and letterhead design by yours truly;
• A premium WordPress theme license;
• 1000 business cards printed with the custom design I’ll provide.

There will be only one winner for the whole package and there will be writing involved.

And just so that you can see a sample of what you could get, here’s a logo I’ve designed for a previous contest winner:

Check back Monday and be careful with how you manage your blog contests!

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Let’s celebrate! Why? Because with the latest post, Blogsessive now totals 100 published posts and this calls for a celebration and a prize for one of you, Blogsessive’s loyal readers.

The prize consists in a customized version of my free WordPress theme “Simple Balance”.

Details of this customization will be discussed with the prize winner so that the version that he/she will receive will be built around his/her needs.

What do you need to do in order to win?

No article writing is required this time and no back linking. Simply add a comment to this blog post explaining why do you need this theme. That’s all!

So, let’s get the ball rolling and the next monday I’ll put an end to the contest and ramdomly pick one of the comment authors as the contest winner.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Blogsessive’s May contest on has ended and the results are as follows:

Brenda has won 1 domain name pre-registered for 3 years with this post.

SE7EN has won 1 domain name pre-registered for 3 years with this post.

And since there where only 3 entries on this contest, I’ve decided that the third entry will also receive a prize.

rish_22 has won 1 domain name pre-registered for 1 year with this post.

All winners have been contacted. The three entries were picked in a random order, not based on quality of the post or any other factor.

Thanks for participating and congratulations on your prizes! Use them well!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

On May’s contest I’m going to offer 2 .com domain names registered for 3 years to 2 bloggers.
It doesn’t matter if you already have your own domain or want to launch a new blog, either way you are eligible for the prize. The prize domains will be chosen by you, as long as they are available for registration.

Rules of May 2008 Contest

The rules are simple. Write a post on your personal blog with related to the blogging phenomenon and link it to this post so that i can acknowledge and count your contest entry.
There is no limit to the post’s length, but please don’t make it a 1 phrase post and don’t copy content or publish news. It is important that we spread the word about how wonderful this phenomenon is, and by doing so, we will provide more information to all those looking to start blogging.

On May 31st, 2 of the contest entries will be randomly picked and will become the winners of each of the 2 domain names.

Thank you for your participation and good luck!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive