I know it might seem like a "Thank you" speech, but I had to blog about this experience, so here it goes. A proof that hard work and dedication really pay - I won the People's choice award on Indiblogger's contest sponsored by Dove and Yahoo. The contest held the biggest monetary prizes ever to be given on India's blogosphere, so naturally it attracted lots of people. I wrote my article the very day I got a notification from Indiblogger's team about the contest. Earlier I thought of writing a series of articles on the same topic because of how diverse it was, and I even drafted a couple more. But, I couldn't focus better on the rest of the articles as all my attention was driven to this particular one. Till 22nd may, I used to read my article daily and add or update certain things; in fact now I’ve memorized my article by heart.
Honestly, I didn't know what editorial team was looking for as I wrote my perception only from my personal experience, and when I read what others had written I felt the vast diversity in what people could relate “Real Beauty” to. So that decision was out of my limits, but People's choice was something I could foresee reaching properly, with right efforts and right strategies. Even while cooking meals, I had strategies running in my mind on how I could let more and more people reach it.
I discussed it with my husband and he whole heartedly supported me. We spent almost all the weekends, right from the time the contest started till it ended, publicizing the article, and building ways so that it could reach maximum number of people. (I will write a separate article on the strategies we adopted. :-)). We contacted many of our friends to help us out. A couple of them agreed immediately and worked on spreading the word. But, as is the case with such kind of things, it is hard to always trust everyone.
One of the friends took our strategies and entered her post in the contest, without even letting us now (as if we were gonna do anything to her..lol). This person also removed us from the friend list so that we don't come to know about her activities. Luckily, I was obsessed with checking every single post daily morning and evening, and I came to know about the little fraud that happened. We definitely had to change our strategy now, as that was already taken by the other person and she was hoarding votes rapidly by following that. However, it might be for our good, because our new strategy gave us real good boost and by the time contest ended on 6th of June, my entry had crossed 3000 Facebook likes, which was around 1000 more than the second highest one.
The result date of the contest somehow got extended to 15th June (from initial 10th June), and I was waiting peacefully for the results to come, assured that I had anyway got the "People's choice" award, when another twist happened. An entry I'd noticed in past 2-3 weeks that had around 600 votes by the time the contest ended, suddenly started gaining votes at inhuman speed. I mean literally, the person moved from 600 to 4643 votes within 2 nights!! Strangely nothing much happened to the entry in day time. Even on June 9th I saw that the entry had 1200 votes in morning that reached 1798 votes by evening. The moment clock struck 10 at night; the votes started increasing by a ratio of 50 in 50 seconds. Every refresh would make the votes go up by 50 and it was really baffling to see that.
I saw all my hard work going down the drain with the kind of trend her votes were following. It was the time to report the matter to the contest organizers. Strangely, God wanted me to sleep peacefully that night and hence even at night 10 PM, I got the following reply of my mail from the Indiblogger team:
Hey Kimi,
Sorry for not replying earlier - was traveling for a team member's engagement.
Not to worry - FB likes were counted at the time the contest closed. Any hoarding now will not count. :-)
Keep blogging,
Renie Ravin
Founder & Web Architect
http://www.indiblogger.in
Needless to say, I was so relieved that it took me sometime to grasp what was written in the mail. I was so happy to see the fairness in the contest and such quick and clear reply from the team. They definitely knew what they were doing and didn’t leave anything on chance.
I want to thank everyone of you for liking my article and voting for me. I want to thank the Indiblogger team, Dove and Yahoo for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts in this wonderful contest and for letting me read all those heart touching entries (I read every single post and promoted all of them; I loved them all so much). I want to thank my dear friends who helped me in this awesome work of achieving this amazing landmark in clear honest ways (I learned lots of honest and effective marketing strategies through this contest about which I’ll talk in a separate article), and lastly I want to thank my dear husband without whose support nothing could have been possible!!
Thank you everyone!! :) :) :)
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