Winners of the Second Dorm Room Biz Contest

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So, I just drew the winners for the second contest here at Dorm Room Biz. The entry numbers were no where near the first contest, but that is alright, I’m still happy to provide some great prizes to two people.

With out further waiting, the winners are:

First Place: Bunny
Second Place: Sena

The entries totaled 21 (combined number of comments, rss subscribes, and blog posts).

I’ve emailed the winners about claiming their prizes. If they don’t claim within 3 days, I’ll pick a new winner for that prize.

Congrats to the winners!

I hired a virtual assistant…

Yupp, you read that right. I hired a virtual assistant over the weekend. There are a number of tasks that I have been continuously putting off doing because I felt like I either didn’t have the time to just sit down and do or I didn’t want to do. So, a virtual assistant (VA) was a great solution to the problem.

Since people have been asking, I am going to write up a couple posts about how I found the one I hired and what criteria I had, so keep an eye out for that to come soon. I’ll continue sharing my experiences of working with my new VA as time passes as well.

On a side note, if you were looking for the secret phrase in the rss feed for this entry to enter the second Dorm Room Biz contest, I have not started putting them out yet. I’ll be installing the script tonight and they should start showing up soon. In the mean time, check out the other ways to enter the contest!

More contests on the way? Here are some tips.

With the success of my first contest here at Dorm Room Biz, I have decided to run another contest coming up. I had a couple potential sponsors contact me after the first contest and offer prizes, so you should get excited about this upcoming one. It will offer you all, as young/student entrepreneurs, a great prize that will hopefully help to kick your business up to the next notch!

Along that note, Shoemoney posted a bunch of tips for running successful contests the other day. Many of these I followed, but a couple I hadn’t thought about - like what the local laws say about running a contest. Anyway, if you are thinking about running a contest on your blog or website, check out the tips that Jeremy put together!

The Month in Review: September Earnings and More

September has come and gone and now we get back into the holiday season. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are right around the corner! I am pretty sure Wal-Mart is already stocking the Christmas items, too!

Anyway, with the month finished, its about that time that I sometimes put together a earnings post for the month and all around update on the status of the site. So, lets get started.

SEPTEMBER EARNINGS

Private Ads: $10.00
Sponsored Reviews: $9.75
Text Link Ads: $25.52
ReviewMe: $40.00
Adsense: $14.73
TOTAL: $100.00

Some notes on the earnings and other items…
On top of the $14.73 that I “earned” from AdSense for the month, I actually got my latest Adsense payment of over $100. Since I don’t make enough through AdSense to get a monthly deposit (more than $100), it is nice every couple months when it does come through.

I have sold a few private ads on the site over the past few months and there has also been a lot of interest in purchasing advertising on the site. If you are interested, check out the rates on the Advertise page and then get in contact with me to discuss. All the ad formats are available (text link, image ad, and sponsored posts).

I am happy that I hit the $100 mark again for the month, that is good news. I hope that this month we will be able to get over that and get closer to $150. With two new bloggers on board to help write for the site, I think we will be able to pump out some great content that will hopefully attract some more monthly advertisers and sponsors. Page views and visitors have taken about a 40% increase in September from August and just about doubled from July. I know they are not impressive numbers (1200 visits and 1600 page views) but they are continuing to go up daily and look forward to what October brings.

With college classes back in full force for everyone, I will hopefully be able to put out some useful content for student entrepreneurs - if you have ideas for posts, please let me know and we will write about them! Also, if you have questions you’d like for us to try to answer, email me and we will either email you back or post about it on the site!

Obviously the most popular post from the month was the contest post. As I already reviewed after the contest finished, there were over 300 combined entries and over 80 comments. Some of the other popular posts for the month included:

• 12 Websites You Need to Be Using As An Entrepreneur
• Are You A Toilet Entrepreneur?

We also got out 14 posts for the month, which equates to almost one every other day. October is going to be better - I swear! Keep a look out!

I think that is about all the updates that I have for now. October is a busy month for me (as far as the weekends go) but I should be able to get a lot of posts written while at work…like I am now.

Anyway, keep your heads up, keep hustlin’, and keep making the green!

-Chris

P.S. New Dorm Room Biz design is still in the works - look for it to be launching this month…..I hope! It should be great!

P.S.S. Thanks for continuing to come back and visit the site! Be sure to subscribe via RSS or Email and then follow me on Twitter!

Dorm Room Biz Contest Winners

Alright, here is the post that everyone has been waiting for! The contest here at Dorm Room Biz has come to a close (this past Friday) and it is now time to announce the winners. I have a bunch of prizes to give out, so there is a nice list of winners!

Real quick though, there were over 85 comments on the post and collectively there were more than 300 entries from comments, posting about the contest, and people subscribing to the blog via email and RSS.

And, again, here are the prizes that are about to be given away:

• $50 via PayPal - 1st place
• The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book by Mike Michalowicz, signed copy - 1st place
• 1 Month of advertising on Blogtrepreneur, 125×125 ad spot ($50 value) - 1st place
• 1,000 EntreCard Credits - 2nd place
• You Call The Shots book by Cameron Johnson, signed copy - 2nd place
• 1 Month of advertising on Young Entrepreneur Blog, 125×125 ad spot - 3rd place
• The Student Success Manifesto book by Michael Simmons, signed copy - 4th place
• Zero to One Million book by Ryan Allis - 5th place
• Great Failures of the Extremely Successful by Steve Young - 6th place
• Ten Minutes To The Job Interview by Rachel Ingegneri - 7th place

Here are the winners and their places:

1. Monica
2. Shebado
3. David
4. Natalia
5. TheContestBlogger
6. Wiehanna
7. Mrs. Accountability

I have emailed all the winners and once they reply, I will get their prizes sent off to them. If for some reason I do not hear back from any of the winners within 48 hours, The next in line will be bumped up.

To draw the winning numbers, I used the random generator at www.random.org and I recommend it if you are doing anything like this in the future!

Thanks again to everyone who entered and made this such a great and successful contest. I look forward to running another one soon and will have to start generating a list of prizes/sponsors! If you’d be interested in sponsoring a prize, please contact me!

Update on The Contest

Hey Everyone! Just a quick update about the Dorm Room Biz contest.

• You have until Midnight Eastern Time tomorrow, September 19th, to enter. You can enter either through comments, blogging about it, or by subscribing via email.
• The prize pool is well stacked and there should be lots of winners!
• The original post has gotten almost 80 comments! That is the most I have had on any post yet, so I am pretty excited about that!
• We have over 50 people entered in the contest and most of them have more than one entry.

Now, here is the important update.

I will be away this weekend so the winners will not be announced until Sunday evening, unlike originally planned. I will be in West Virginia for the largest whitewater festival and have a vendor booth set up. I hope to have a lot of pictures, videos, and posts about my experiences next week.

So, although all entries must be in by Friday Sept. 19th at Midnight EST, the winners will not be announced until Sunday the 21st. I moderate all the comments, so if you get one in before the deadline and do not see it until Sunday on the site, it is just because I didn’t have an internet connection to be able to approve it, but it will count.

Any questions??!!?? I’m looking forward to giving away all the great prizes!

New Authors Coming To Dorm Room Biz

Just a quick note this morning - I have a couple new authors that have agreed to post on Dorm Room Biz about once a week. This will hopefully bring some great new content to the site. So…you should probably get excited about the changes that are happening and the articles that are going to be getting published. Topics are going to vary and cover a large array of arenas, so it will be good.

Please welcome Matt Unger and Sophie Marston on board to Dorm Room Biz!

I’d don’t want to talk about them and go into a full detailed introduction to them because they should be posting their own introduction soon, so this is just to note what is coming.

Also, the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur himself, Mike Michalowicz will probably be putting up some posts now and again on a whole array of topics…and of course be pushing his book. However, I suggest you enter into the contest for a chance to win it as opposed to paying for it right off the bat!

Whats Going On Around Dorm Room Biz?

I thought I’d put together a general update to kick off the month of September covering some Dorm Room Biz related news as well as some other notes and links.

Happenings at Dorm Room Biz:

• Check out the contest going on now: The contest goes until the 19th so join in on the fun and win some cool prizes! More prizes are being added this week, so get your entries in.
• August Earnings: August saw a major drop in income because of being a pretty much vacation month for me. Besides working my job, I enjoyed some extended weekends for vacations and therefore was not able to put as much into monetizing this site. However, I did keep the site profitable with some sponsored posts and links. Earnings for the month were around $70 which came from ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews, and Text Link Ads.
• Wrapping up a new theme for the website!

Other Cool Stuff Around The Web:

• My friends over at Blogtrepreneur published a massive list of 101 resources for managing your money online. If you want to keep track of your finances online, then you should definitely check it out!
• Market Leverage continues to rock it out with some pretty big contests around the web, especially over at Tyler Cruz’s site. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend signing up with ML to start taking your affiliate commissions to the next level.
• If you have not been following The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur blog and website, then you should. There is tons of great content posted including videos, so check it out now!

The First Ever Dorm Room Biz Contest!

Almost three years have gone by since starting Dorm Room Biz way back in the day of December 2005. So now here we are in 2008 and it is time to kick up the dust a little bit and run what will hopefully turn out to be a cool contest. The idea is simple: help promote and grow Dorm Room Biz in anyway you can (posting, commenting, subscribing, emailing, etc). For your efforts, you have the opportunity to win some cool prizes. I’ll outline all the details below.

How To Enter

As with most of the contests that go on around the blogosphere, there are a few different ways to enter and earn chances to win a prize. Here they are:

1. Comment on this post and you will get one entry
2. Comment on other posts throughout the course of the contest and get one entry for each comment. Comments need to be worthwhile and not just a “nice post” type of comment. Have some substance people!
3. Write about the contest on your blog and receive 5 entries into the contest. Please provide a trackback to this post or leave a comment with a link to your post.
4. Subscribe to the email feed and get another 5 entries for the contest.

Everyone who participates will be entered into a random generator and names will be pulled for the winners randomly.

Contest Timeline

The contest starts…TODAY and runs until September 19th. On the 20th I will run the names and announce the winners.

The Prizes

I know this is the section you guys have been waiting for, so here is a list of the prizes that are up for grabs.

• $50 via PayPal - 1st place
• The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur book by Mike Michalowicz, signed copy - 1st place
• 1 Month of advertising on Blogtrepreneur, 125×125 ad spot ($50 value) - 1st place
• 1,000 EntreCard Credits - 2nd place
• You Call The Shots book by Cameron Johnson, signed copy - 2nd place
• 1 Month of advertising on Young Entrepreneur Blog, 125×125 ad spot - 3rd place
• The Student Success Manifesto book by Michael Simmons, signed copy
• Zero to One Million book by Ryan Allis
• Great Failures of the Extremely Successful by Steve Young
• Ten Minutes To The Job Interview by Rachel Ingegneri

You can see the prizes listed for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places. The other books and any other prizes that get sponsored will be given at random!

There are still lots of opportunities for contest sponsors and I am constantly searching and talking with people to get more prizes for this!

Dorm Room Business Competition - Start Up Nation

I am sure that some of you have already heard about the dorm room business competition that StartUpNation is sponsoring, but in case you have not, I thought I would give a quick post about it; just to share the details with you all.

Are you a college entrepreneur with a great business?

If so, you should enter the StartupNation Dorm-Based 50 ranking for a chance to be named one of America’s top 50 college-based businesses of 2008.

You’ll be joining some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs who made their way to the top by combining “campus” with “commerce”. Think Michael Dell, Bill Gates and more recent high-fliers like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Brian Taylor of Kernel Seasons.

America’s collegiate entrepreneurs continue to thrive, taking bold risks and making business breakthroughs. The winners of the 2008 StartupNation Dorm-Based 50 will be no exception. This ranking will salute outstanding collegiate students for their achievements as well as their future prospects as entrepreneurs.

What’s the upside of being named a winner? Extensive national promotion on leading national TV, radio, online and print media outlets. Be ready, though - winners in other StartupNation competitions have received so much traffic from media attention that their websites have literally crashed. For bragging rights, winners will also receive a Dorm-Based 50 Winner’s Emblem that they can locate on their websites and in emails.

What’s the downside? Ummm… we couldn’t think of any.

To be considered, entrants must currently be attending college in the U.S. (though not necessarily living in a dorm) and must have a business website.

After filling out our simple online form to enter, winners will be judged on a some or all of the following criteria:

• Innovativeness of business concept
• Potential for growth
• Cutting-edge business practices
• Potential for overall impact
• Financial performance

Entries will be accepted through March 15, 2008. Winners will be announced in the national press on April 10, 2008.

StartupNation is collaborating with College Boxes, iContact, MSN and Fox Business Channel for the 2008 StartupNation Dorm-Based 50.

Still have questions? Contact us and we’ll get back to you quickly.

Think your dorm room business has what it takes to be among the top? Then go ahead and enter today!