Yesterday I did my tax return, it had been playing on my mind for about four weeks (worried that I didn’t have enough saved to pay it straight away). Thankfully, I did, and for that reason I can start hosting contests again! The April contest yielded some fairly decent entries, the results of which can be seen here. Everybody has now been paid their winnings and there is enough left in the account to have another go.
I’m going to change the approach this time, rather than force people into a tight subject area I am going to make the requirements really broad, many of you will be able to enter the contest with articles that you were going to write anyway. The contest is open from now, if you see this post then you can enter. Articles in the following categories can be entered into the competition:
- Animals
- Babies & Toddlers
- Film
- Finance
- Gardens & Plants
- Military and War
- Pregnancy
- Real Estate
- Reference
- Weddings
Instead of holding contests for the sake of it, I felt that they could be used as a means of bringing more balance to the site. All of the above categories currently have less than 10 articles in them, whilst certain categories are (applying relativity) pretty saturated. Health for example has 114 articles, Internet has 101 articles, Food has 78, and Business has 60. That doesn’t mean that fresh articles aren’t welcome in those categories of course, it would be fantastic if we could end up with hundreds in each.
Submission Requirements
I am going to keep it really simple, in order to allow you to express yourself however you see fit. The only conditions are:
- Minimum 400 words (100 more than the usual minimum for contests)
- Must be placed into one of the categories above, and relevant to that category
- Must be tagged with the phrase ‘June Contest’, that is June Contest (I saw a few articles last time which looked like contest entries, but which were not tagged as required).
- Do not start your article with an image. (This is going to be a new site rule, as starting with an image looks awful with the new ad layout)
- Submissions must be received by the end of 29th June, in your time zone. The contest finishes at the end of 30th June in my timezone, but sticking to 29th June ends timezone confusion!
- You must have an active PayPal account, else you won’t receive payment.
- Submissions must comply with all other site rules, the main one being that you are not submitting adult content, anything to do with gambling, or anything illegal.
Prizes
- $25
- $10
- $5
Other things to know
- Payment will be received whenever I get around to it, I paid April contest prizes today (23rd May), so be prepared to wait a few weeks.
- The judge will be an online editor from somewhere, but not necessarily the same judge as last time, so don’t approach the judge with bribes of chocolate and ice cream!
- This is just a bit of fun, don’t take it too seriously, interesting articles are most likely to win. There is a spell checker on Excerptz, so spelling mistakes are the most likely thing to lose a contest. Not so bothered about grammar, unless you do something silly like write entirely in lower case with no full stops.
Everybody should have something to say in at least one of those broad categories, so I am looking forward to seeing your entries!