This morning Andy Beal announced the winner of the SEM Scholarship contest he’s been running the past month:¬† Ben Wills for “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing“.
As one of the judges for the scholarship, you might imagine that an article about social media would attract my attention and it did.¬† Ben walks away a $6,000 scholarship prize, which in reality, will be worth far more because of the additional knowledge he’ll gain. One on one consulting with Andy Beal alone, is probably worth the six grand.
Ben is not the only winner in this scholarship promotion, Andy Beal and Marketing Pilgrim walk away with a ton of new inbound links, traffic, subscrbers and industry visibility.¬† Not that Andy needs any more of that. 🙂
What I thought was particularly impressive about this promotion is that it illustrates the growing slant toward creative skills with SEO. There is no substitute for the ability to write well for readers as well as search engines and also the ability to recognize promotion opportunities, networks and links.
Thanks for helping with the Judging! It was certainly interesting to see the methods used by entrants, knowing they had just one week to drive traffic – it forced them to think beyond simply sitting back and waiting for Google.