Ayrshire Students Blogging for Dinner!

Okay, so the title maybe makes Plan B sound like a major abuser of the government's new workfare programme but in explanation to the rest of you, this blog is for the attention of a group of Ayrshire students who are doing a little bit of online coursework and the practical aspects of blogging! We are not exploiting under nourished students...

The Prize

We understand that a prize for dinner for two at the wonderful Western House Hotel is the prize that's up for grabs to the "winner" of the competition.

The competition itself has another benefit however and that is that it should help raise the profile of an event being held to raise funds for the Vanessa Appeal. It therefore has real relevance and can have genuine impacts.

The Background

Plan B and Dundonald Golf Club have got together to host a charity golf event in August of this year at the Ayshire Links golf course. The event has space for 25 teams of four golfers with an entry fee of £255 per team with proceeds going to the Vanessa Appeal.

The event which is being held for the second year is part of the run up to the Annual Dundonald Games and the key difference is that this event is a KILTED golf classic - all players are expected to play in their kilts.

The event has a website up and running with all of the key information in there along with a page with entry details and a downloadable entry form.

The Challenge
The student challenge is to create a blog page or pages - your call - that will take an aspect of the event with your spin on it and create a blog article that has the direct aim of generating interest from golfers not only from Ayrshire but beyond with a view to selling the event out by the end of March.

Who's your target? Well there's local businesses, local media, local websites, Facebook pages, Twitter. VisitScotland? The newspapers? Golf Websites? Golf Tour Operators? Local hotels, restaurants?

Your goal is to write your blog article and get it read and actioned by as many targeted readers as possible. We will track page views, we shall see blog comments - and part of the challenge is how do you engage users and encourage comments - and hopefully we'll see direct bookings. We will be able to track links into the website www.dundonaldgamesgolf.co.uk form individual articles so make sure you use them too!

The Process

• Write your article using the guidelines on the Blogging Intro page make sure you've thought about your title, content, images and author name! List your tags at the foot of the article.
• Put your Articles title into the Subject area of a blank emailPut your content into the message area of your email with the tags below
• Send the email to the following address pbsdiary.student@blogger.com 

The competition will "close" on the 31st of March and we shall then decide on the winner. Most page views is going to bepart of the mix, more importantly will be click throughs to the website. Any bookings with an article reference secure big bonus points!

If you have any queries or are looking for advice on how you can achieve something different contact Ian McCaig - please keep it by email only though.

Click For some guidelines on how to build a good blog article