The Blog for a year competition

Posted on October 1, 2007
Filed Under Blogging

Through a contact on Facebook,I was introduced to a site with an interesting idea. The site is called Blog for a Year. The idea is that they will pay somebody $80,000 to allow them to quit their job (not required) and work on their blog for an entire year.

Just exactly how are they going to do that, you might ask… I know, because that’s what I asked. First, you need some bloggers. The bloggers get nominated (I don’t think there is any rule against nominating yourself). Then, they go and tell all their friends, family, co-workers and anybody who will listen to go to the site and vote for them (up to once per day). At the same time, the site is taking donations. As soon as the donation pool reaches $160,000 the blogger with the most votes is offered the job.

Collecting $160,000 to pay out $80,000??? may be your next question (yes, it was also mine). The about page says that the extra money goes to pay for hosting, taxes, legal fees, etc, etc. Any money left over will go towards future competitions. OK, fair enough. I can live with that. But, what if you never reach the $160,000 mark? They have that angle covered as well. If the donation fund doesn’t reach it’s goal, on January 1st, 2008 they will offer the top vote getter half the amount of the donation fund. With 3 months to go, I’d say they have their work cut out for them. The donation fund is currently sitting at $1,958.

If you are thinking about winning the competition, unless you have a relentless and large fan base that will vote for you on a daily basis, or unless you have the be-all-end-all of hard luck stories, I’d say you probably don’t have much of a chance.

I like the concept, though I don’t expect they are going to get anywhere near their goal of 160K unless they find some corporate advertisers to foot the bill. If I were running the site I would throw affiliate links to the bigger online shopping stores (amazon, ebay, etc…) and then suggest to the bloggers to request that their voters also use those links when planning to shop online. Heck, with nearly 200 bloggers already signed up, they could cast a fairly sizable net for online shoppers.

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