We’re half-way through a 4-part series about my experience as a travel blogger in the Ultimate Thailand Explorers Contest. If you’d like to read my first post, click here. And for my second post, click here.  Today’s post is all about the finalist period.

The Voting and Assignment Periods for Finalists

From December 1st, 2009 until January 8th, 2009 Internet Users from around the world could vote for 1 team out of the 5 finalists (Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Koh Samui and Bangkok). Voters could vote once every 24 hours. The team with the most votes would receive the grand prize, $10,000.

What I Learned

The Voting and Assignment periods for finalists truly combined the skills, talents and network strategies from the application and semi-finalists periods. Sometime around mid-November we were given our blog passwords and could start writing. Our strategy was to simply write the best blog. We wanted to be creative, set the standard and most importantly of all, be engaging and informative. Our thought was, by writing the best blog we’d amass the most votes.

Content – I was so proud of our blog. We received so many comments about how engaging, fun and informative it was. We really wanted to connect with readers. We knew that many of them wanted to be in our shoes, so we felt that it was our responsibility to work hard, and show them Thailand.

In the weeks leading up to our departure, we reached out to readers by hosting polls on our blog. We allowed them to select which optional activities we would visit in Pattaya. We filmed a YouTube video where we had them guess some of the locations on our itinerary (see below). And we also set up a Skype and AIM Account to chat real-time.

In many of our posts we encouraged them to leave their feedback by commenting on the day’s topic. And once we arrived in Thailand, we continued those polls and opportunities to contribute to the conversation. It was the most and the best I’ve ever written.

Virtually every post included a YouTube video and/or a Flickr photo set. They each took about 2 hours to write. Half of that time was editing the video. All the work was worth it when the Tourism Authority of Thailand voted us with the Best Sponsor Promotion Award.

But despite the work, the votes didn’t come. It was clear after the first few days of voting that people weren’t voting based on the quality of the blogs. Two of the teams that were ahead of us had nothing on their blog for at least a week – and had amassed hundreds more votes than us. Then even into the competition, when we were blogging every night with the goings-on for the day, our competition advanced by thousands of votes – without writing a word. It was frustrating.

It was clear that those voting for the other teams were not necessarily voting based on quality of the blog, but because they were friends of the team. And that was something we made a conscious decision not to focus on. Now before you think I’m nuts for what appears to be giving up on 10K, let me explain.

Rallying people to vote for you and writing great blog posts require, what I believe, to be two very different strategies. We entered this competition not to be better vote getters, but to learn how to be better bloggers. Could we beg, plead and promote ourselves to others so that they would vote. Certainly. But what would we learn? And even if we did. Vote-getting is tiring and time consuming. It was selfish in a way to ask our friends for more favors to vote repeatedly everyday. We won the trip to Thailand, wasn’t that enough? When Brian and I decided to just blog, the competition became less stressful and more fun. And that’s what it was all about. I don’t regret the decision one bit. adventureswithben.com is going to be much better for it. I can promise you that.

Traditional Media – We continued our efforts to promote the competition to our local papers and television stations. Like before we sent out press releases. My hometown paper, the Fall River Herald, did a nice article on us. Read it here. We also were published in the Pattaya Mail here and a follow-up here.

New Media – We also reached out to many, many bloggers with some success. We didn’t get the broad coverage that we had hoped, but we got some. We continued with twitter, but really focused our efforts on Facebook. Our posts were sent immediately to our wall and we posted on multiple groups and fan pages. That really helped spread the word.

Speaking of facebook. Why not become a fan of adventureswithben by clicking here.

******

On January 8th the results came in and we finished in 5th place. Considering I didn’t expect to make it to the semi-finals, this was fantastic. We won an award for our blog and a weekend in Phuket too. It was the closest thing to living a dream.

Next week we’ll finish the series with the last installment. What did I learn that can help this site. Where does adventureswithben go from here?