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While I do plan to eventually monetize this website, I don’t plan to anytime in the immediate future. Instead, I would rather increase community participation and give the spots away for free. Every ad spot on DerekBeau.com will be given away for free. All are sitewide and include:

• (1) Standard 468×60 header banner
• (4) Trendy 125×125 sidebar buttons
• (5) Sidebar text links
• (50) Post-level text ads
• (3) RSS feed text ads

There are four things you can do to increase your chances of winning these ad spots on DerekBeau.com, they are:

• Leave a comment on any post - All you have to do is leave a comment on this blog and you get 1 entry. There is a limit of 20 entries per person awarded for comments.
• Link to any page in a new post on your blog - Write a new post on your blog and link to any page on DerekBeau.com within it to receive 5 entries. This is limited to once per post (even if you link twice in the same post) but you can get multiple entries by linking from multiple posts.
• Mention this contest on your blog - Mention this contest within any new post on your blog and receive 10 entries. This is limited to one entry per blog but you can write multiple mentions if you have multiple blogs.
• Write a review on your blog - If you write a dedicated review of DerekBeau.com, you will receive 15 entries. This is limited to one entry per blog but you can write multiple reviews if you have multiple blogs.

Note: Aside from the comments, you must notify me via email of any entries that you submit. It will be too difficult for me to keep track of everything, especially if some trackbacks don’t go through.

This is going to take place for the entire month of October, and your ad will run for all of November. This will give you the benefit of any growth that occurs on DerekBeau.com throughout the month of October.

I will post weekly updates on the contest so that you can see how many qualified entries you have, and the final drawing results will be announced in the early A.M. of September 1st.

Unless more than 50 people enter, everyone will win something. All winners will be drawn at random from a computer randomizer program. Here are the prize tiers:

• 1st: first choice of 5 ad spots
• 2nd: second choice of 4 available ad spots
• 3rd: third choice of 3 available ad spots
• 4th: fourth choice of 2 available ad spots
• 5th-50th: first-come choice of 1 available ad spot

So don’t miss your chance of winning some free links and advertising for your blog!

Growth Statistics From September

To give you an idea of the exposure you will receive when you win free advertising, here is the growth that DerekBeau.com saw throughout September. I’m sure we will see further growth during October.

• Technorati ranking dropped from 100,000+ to just above 30,000
• 3-month Alexa ranking fell to 84,412, with a one day low of about 27,000
• PageRank still hasn’t updated, but Yahoo! is now showing ~4,000 back links
• RSS feed subscribers increased by about 120, putting the total at +/- 300
• Visitors and pageviews increased by 2.6x over August to ~5,000 visits
• Search engine traffic is just starting to kick in, now up to 40-50 visits per day

Don’t forget to email me with any entries that you are submitting to this contest.