Introducing The Tour de Personal Finance Competition – Submit Your Best Posts Today!

The goal of the Tour de Personal Finance will be to crown the best (voted by readers – read below for details) personal finance blog article written during the last year.

How The Tour de Personal Finance Will Work

The Tour de Personal Finance will be conducted each year in July during the same time period in which the Tour de France cycling race occurs. The format/layout will be as follows:

• Personal finance bloggers will submit their best, highest quality post from the past year (only one post) to me via email (see below for details of how to submit a post) before July 1st.
• The posts will then be paired off using a random number generator.
• The paired posts will “compete” against each other each day in a stage (what they call each day of racing in the Tour de France), which will be posted on My Personal Finance Journey.
• Readers will comment on the post to vote for which post they think is better. The post with the most votes each day will be declared the STAGE WINNER.
• The stage winners will move on to the next round, where they will square off against other stage winners. Again, the best post each day will be voted for by the readers.
• The blog author will be allowed to vote for him/herself. Others will most likely do it, so you should too! But, no gaming of the system will be allowed. Entrants will, however, be allowed to ask their friends to vote for them, promote the contest on their site, etc.
• At the end of the month, the final winner of the competition will be crowned the Maillot Jaune (or the yellow jersey, which is given to the overall winner of the Tour de France each year). Ties will be broken by me. 

Winners’ Jerseys

In the Tour de France, there are 4 main winners’ jerseys that are fiercely contested. These include the Yellow Jersey (overall winner), Green Jersey (best sprinter), Polka-Dot Jersey (King of the Mountains), and White Jersey (best-placed young cyclist). 

As such, along with crowning the overall winner with the Yellow Jersey (as mentioned above), the Tour de Personal Finance will recognize 4 winners each July, as described below:

• Yellow Jersey – Winner of overall competition. Article voted “best” by readers.
• White Jersey – Goes to highest placing, new blog (judged by how far they get in the competition and how long they have been blogging).
• Green Jersey – Goes to the blog whose article wins a single stage “the fastest.” In other words, the Green Jersey goes to the blog who wins a single stage by the biggest margin against their competitor.
• Polka-Dot Jersey – Goes to the best blog article entered which details information on “climbing” out of the debt “mountain”.

How To Enter

If you are a personal finance blogger and are interested in participating, entering is very easy! Just send the following information in an email to Jacob@mypersonalfinancejourney.com to enter by July 1st, 2011.

• Name and URL of blog.
• URL and title of your best article from last 12 months.
• A concise 2-5 sentence description of the post (this will be posted on each stage’s announcement, so really SELL why post should win!).
• The month and year in which you started blogging (will be used to determine White Jersey winner).