Why join blogging competitions?

I’ve stumbled on to this blog from mybloglog and have been following her blog for a while. In the blog, she talks about many different blogging tip and tricks.

Recently, the webmaster, Divya, has launched a new website – Blogging to fame. It looked promising – the site promises to give recognition to talented bloggers.

I was quite excited about this. Even though I may have not the same notoriety as some of the more well known blogs, I know that I’m a good blogger and I think that Marina’s Bloggariffic deserves more recognition.

Plus, the prizes awarded too, looks super sweet. The top prize is :

• $25,000 in cash
• Blogging to Fame Gold Trophy
• Pass to attend the Seminar and award ceremony
• Return Travel Tickets from Hometown to Chicago and Back
• Hotel Reservations for Four Days, Three Nights
• Blog Launching and Consultancy be an A-List Blogger

Now, which blogger doesnt want that? I jumped to register into the contest. 25K would be very useful for our wedding ceremony. And a chance to meet other renowed bloggers. Alvin mentioned that the Secondlife convention will be held at the same place too. If I win, that’ll be like a double whammy as I would love for to meet other secondlifers. This contest sounds awesome!

On the other hand, although blogging contests can be good at propelling for a blog, many of them end up biased and turn out to being a popularity contest.

Take for example, the bloggers choice awards. It started out innocently enough with bloggers nominating blogs whom they feel should have more recognition. But as time went by, blogs which had a higher readership and more supporters, had the upper hand.

Same goes for these websites –

The weblog awards. Which isn’t all that bad, as each nominations are scanned and benchmarked. I see many quality blogs in there. But eventually, again it is the most popular blog will have the most votes.

There is also Sgfriends.net. Though the people manning the forums are one of the nicest moderators I’ve come across, the website could be a little overwhelming.

I think there’s something wrong when blogs are awarded due to their popularity, rather than their actual content as people with more aquaintances will have the added advantage. Maybe the organizers should rename these contests as popularity contests instead?

So I try to avoid blogging contests. Because this blog just don’t have that much of an impact to make a huge difference. Lets take blogexplosion for example

Eastcoastlife has a point. In Blogexplosion’s battle of the blog, many Asian blogs don’t usually win, even if their blog content is superior to their western counterparts.

In my last battle, my last post was about when Cartcart was in Singapore. I wrote about real life experiences and insights, posted pictures about places to visit while in Singapore. My opponent wrote brief posts about soccer. I know my posts had more substance and I thought I’d have a landslide win. Imagine my surprise to see such a close run. Maybe there were many soccer fans on that night? 😛

But in the end, even if I don’t win the coveted awards, that doesn’t mean that my value as a blogger is depreciated. I am self assured of my capabilities and I’d like to think that my blogging style is real, approachable and down to earth.

So, do you think this blog is worthy? Would you vote for Marina’s Bloggariffic? And what are your thoughts about blogging contests? Why not join the contest too. Maybe we could go to Chicago together. Or maybe your blog would be so popular that mine would be knocked off into oblivion, hehehe.

Anyway, good luck!

Sidenote : I’m curious to know how the organizers amassed that much money to fund for this contest. $100k is a lot of money. And I don’t see any sponsors link anywhere.