OK, after a good night’s sleep an hour or two working through the list to weed out a couple of little problems I’ve just selected a winner for the Top 5 Group Writing Project. Before I announce them – here are a few administrative notes:

• Full List – For those wanting to see the full list in the one place I’ve just put together a compilation page of all 893 entries at Top 5 Group Writing Project Final Submission List. Please keep surfing it, linking up (I think some top 5 favorites would be appropriate) and making friends of those bloggers you find.
• Duplicate Entries – A few people misread (or didn’t read) the rules properly and there were a few who submitted multiple entries. I’ve left them in the list but have only allowed their first entry to be eligible for the prize.
• Late Entries – There have been a few of these – but unfortunately I can’t keep adding new entries to the list. You’re welcome to keep writing Top 5 posts – but they won’t be listed any more – sorry.

Before I announce the Winner – I want to complete my own little Top 5 project – the top five reasons why I think Chitika Rocks.

#5 – On Day 1 I told you that they were interactive ads and very clickable
#4 – On Day 2 I told you about their RPU (related product units) and why they’re cool.
#3 – On Day 3 I told you about their free BlogBash ebook which is filled with great blogging tips
#2 – On Day 4 I told you about eMiniMalls

#1 Reason Why Chitika Rocks

The reason why Chitika Rocks the most can perhaps be summarized best with a little screen shot of the log in page of my Chitika account where they very kindly remind me each time I log in how much money I’ve earned by using them. Here’s what it looks like:

That amount doesn’t include April’s earnings (and goes back to when I started to use them in September 2005) – but when they do update it that figure will go past quarter of a million dollars. What else can I really say? I think Chitika Rocks (and who wouldn’t)!

Thanks again to Chitika for putting up the prize for this project.

The Winner of the Project

Before I announce the winner – let me say that there are many deserving winners this week – I hope that participants have been ‘rewarded’ with a little extra traffic (and for those of you who were featured on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon with your entries a lot of extra traffic).

However there is only one winner and that winner relies completely upon luck as this is a random prize draw.

And that Winner is……

Nancy R. Callahan for her entry Baby names from Video Games.

Congratulations Nancy – I’ll be in touch with you shortly to arrange for $1001 cash to be sent to you from Chitika. Thanks for your entry.

And thanks to everyone for participating! I’ll hoping we can do one of these projects per month from now on in. Feel free to nominate topics below.

It is with great pleasure, mixed with sadness, mixed with a tinge of excitement and mixed with some relief that I now officially close the ‘Top 5′ ProBlogger Group Writing project for this week. No more submissions will be accepted.

To say that the project has been a success would be something of an understatement both on a personal front, a participant front (looking at the numbers of thank you emails that are in my inbox) and from a sponsor’s point of view (if Alden from Chitika’s message to me a few hours is anything to go by).

Today saw the biggest round of submissions for the week with 297 new entries. This takes the week’s total up to 893 (almost triple our previous record). I’m not sure if it was the topic, the prize or luck (or all three) that made this week so successful – but I want to thank everyone for participating by submitting entries and by linking up to those that you love the most. I especially want to thank two important participants in the project.

Thanks Gary

The reason there was such a long gab between this writing project and the last one is that previously running these projects has been so much work as I’ve had to manually copy and paste every entry from emails into posts. This time however I was lucky enough to have Gary King develop a WP plugin that would do the task for me so that all I had to do at the end of each day was copy and paste the list of submissions into a post with my intro. Seeing the numbers of entries we had confirms the decision to go this route – Gary has literally saved me days worth of work. Thanks Mate.

Thanks Chitika – Why They Rock #2

Thanks to the sponsors of this project – Chitika. The #2 reason why I like Chitika as a monetization option for blogs is eMiniMalls. While they have developed a nice array of ad units for blogs it’s one of their first – the eMiniMall that makes me the majority of my Chitika income.

If you’ve not seen one before here’s an example.

These units are highly configurable, very clickable and can payout quite well if you choose the right keywords to target (hint: the more related to your content and audience demographic the better).

Stay tuned for my #1 reason for loving Chitika – it’s going to be a good one!

The Prize

I’m going to post the final list of submissions below and then will post the prize winner in a post tomorrow. The reason for this is that I need to double check that I’ve got everyone’s submissions (one or two slipped through in the changeover between days and there are a few double ups that I need to weed out). This will ensure the winner is drawn fairly. I’ll also post a full list of all entries tomorrow as one list – just so you’ve got them all in the one place for something to do over the weekend!
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Just a short note to say that this week’s ‘Top 5′ writing project is officially over.

The ending of the project coincides with me being out with friends – so I’ll post the final list of today’s submissions later tonight. The prize winner will be announced tomorrow (as I want to double check that everything is accurate before doing so).

Stay tuned and thanks to everyone for participating – it’s been a great project!