Macmillan's Write for Africa 2007

The 30 June deadline for Macmillan’s Write for Africa Competition is looming and my submission is not ready yet.

The competition is biennial, and it would be a pity for me not to enter. So I’ll have to set aside some time this weekend to attend to it.

Other than the $5000 prize money for each category winner( 8-12 and 13-17 categories), there is a lot of recognition and publicity for the winning authors.

So best I get off my duff and pull my story together. Even if I don’t get a mention, I will at least have given the competition a shot.

THE EZINE ARTICLE EXPERIMENT

The Ezine Article experiment is coming along slowly. I was skeptical that there would be benefits to submitting articles to a publishing portal, with the idea that they are made freely available to publishers in return for a biography and link.

But I decided to try it out, as a lot of Internet marketing experts punt is as one of the strongest strategies to drive traffic to your web site or blog.

My caution seemed even more justified as only a few people read my articles in the first week. There is no impact to the traffic to my articles on ITWeb, but more people seem to be reading the articles from the publishers' portal.

Of the people who read the articles, 17 were online publishers. I’m not quite sure how one tracks the actual usage. I don’t know the pubslihers'subscriber numbers either, so it’s hard to tell how many people will eventually read my articles. But that's teh point of the viral marketing - the articles will circulate all over the place, and everyone of the readers may choose to click through to the link I provided.