There’s always something to howl about.

Do you want to know the best Black Pearl of all? When someone offers you a valuable jewel, show up to collect your prize!

During the ProjectBlogger competition last Spring, I advised the contestants to enter a writing contest Problogger.com was hosting. Of all the apprentices, only Teri Lussier entered, with the result that she finished the competition with a huge number of Technorati links and a Page Rank of 4 — truly astounding results for almost no effort.

Say that again: “Truly astounding results for almost no effort.” That’s like a BloodhoundBlog mantra. That’s everything we’re looking for, the leveraged opportunity that produces the best benefits for the least effort at the lowest cost.

Even so, I knew when I announced the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest that few people would enter. The effort was nothing, really, just another blog post. The Grand Prize is a full scholarship to BloodhoundBlog Unchained, but every winning entrant would get a link back to their site on our side-bar. This is possibly the most powerful link in the RE.net. It’s certainly the most powerful link anyone is offering you for free. And we had — count ’em — four entries.

The good news is, they were four great entries. But before we get to them, I’d like to cite three honorable mentions:

  1. Mike Farmer brought us This is not for the contest — just tipping my hat, discussing his plans to create single-property weblogs for his listings.
  2. Teri Lussier took on the entire Social Media Marketing universe with Does the RE.net mean Real Estate or Resist Everything?
  3. And Todd Carpenter knocked my socks off last night with this simple Google search. For now, Todd is dominating the keyword zillow mortgages by sheer blog-power. It will be interesting to see if Zillow is able to take that keyword away from Todd, but, no matter what, he is demonstrating the search-engine leverage of weblogging.

And now… on to the winners:

Kevin Warmath weighs in with If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Video Must Be Worth a Million, a discussion of his odyssey through visual marketing media for his listings.

Brian Miller offers up “…Vee have our vays. You vill sign zee papers…”, which details how he learned how to get more by demanding less.

Colleen Kulikowski shares her secret blend of on-line and off-line marketing techniques in I just want my Western New York Home SOLD!

Those are our three runners-up, and they all did a great job.

The Grand Prize Winner is Thomas Johnson with Down on the ZestiFarm. We’ve talked about this idea many times before, and I’ll be teaching a new twist on geographic farming with photos at Unchained, but Tom hits home run after home run in this post — literally a string of Black Pearls.

Congratulations to all four winners. You’ll all be in our sidebar tonight — so watch those SERPs and backlinks over the next few days. Congratulations to all of you, too, for having the moxie to go diving for Black Pearls. Many people had the opportunity. You four had the wits to seize it. I hope the links you won tonight will bring you even richer opportunities.

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