Well the contest is officially over and yes according to the rules of the game we were victorous.. but that is not what this post is about. Instead we wanted to step back and take a look at the whole thing and talk about a few things.
1. First of all congratulations to Grace Santas for being the winning bidder! We received payment already and the money will be getting donated (we will show the transaction) to WorldVision later this week. We have everything packaged up and as of Monday morning everything will be transferred over to Grace.
2. Garry Conn: Garry is a damn good blogger and one heck of a smart guy. We did not know him from a hole in the ground before this started and he has become a friend and someone we have grown to respect. He is a family man who loves his family and puts them in the place of his life that is most important, which is something we cherish ourselves.
In the COWpetition, Garry did a fantastic job of building a blog with an extremely small budget and used what he had to create a pretty darn good blog… heck we actually bought it (yup.. we paid $850 for it and think it is worth every penny… and we have some good plans for it too) and no Garry did not know we were going to do that 
So look for some changes over on that blog over the next little while and make sure to check out Garry’s blog at http://www.garryconn.com
3. Training Provided: Overall the feedback has been fantastic in regards to the material that was provided during those 4 weeks but sadly there were a small few who actually complained. They said it was a farse and that it was not realistic because it was not focused on the newbie. Well first of all read the original outline, the entire purpose was to build a blog using whatever means we had with the end goal selling it for the most amount of money possible. We mentioned upfront that we were going to talk about the tools we used and not try to make up stories of free tools that we do not use just to appease someone. If you say you can not get anything from the material provided we truly feel you are being closed minded and making that decision with out stepping back and looking at the big picture.
4. Rules of the Contest: We wanted to make sure everyone understands this very clear. The rules of the contest were not whose blog made the most money from affiliate sales or adsense, who had the most opt ins or any other metric like that. There was one single goal and that was who sold the blog for the most amount of money on sitepoint. This goal is what directed to build our blog the way we did… if it would have been about affiliate sales we would have done things different.
5. Bidding on Sitepoint: This was actually a huge eye opener and it always amazes me how much speculation and distrust there is in this industry. We are not sure why it always shocks us, since we have been doing this for a long time now, but it does. We received emails, PMs and comments from people saying it was a scam, having the private bidding was shady and more.
It was even funnier when we openly asked if it would be ok to buy our own site and donate the money to the charity and when people said no we listened and kept it how it was originally laid out but after that a few people then mentioned that they think we are doing something shady behind the scenes. If we were going to do that, why would we have first asked permission.
So please let us lay this out for you…
i. We did private bidding because some people do not like to bid open… we do not know why but that is their own concern. We did not buy our own site, did not have someone we know buy or get someone to buy it… why the heck would we risk ruining our reputation for a single website. The lady that bought the site is someone we have never met or heard of and purchased it on her own will… we asked for a name and picture to be put on this site and she said no to the picture (which is no issue) but her name is Grace Santos and here was the conversation we had over sitepoint PM…
Click Here to Enlarge
ii. We had an individual out right call us shady in the comments of sitepoint and our response to the was “LOL whatever”
The purpose of that response was that if they are going to outright label us as scamming (which is what shady really means) then we are not going to even bother responding. A PM that would allow us to explain would have been more appropriate and then we get a PM from them saying we were unprofessional. Well talk about being a hypocrite… they call our actions shady because someone outbid them and then say we are in the wrong… people need to look in the mirror.
We believe in giving everyone respect but plain and simply do not be an ass and assume things and make comments and expect us to be appreciative of it. Maybe next time, take the time to ask us personally and keep the accusations until you are educated.
6. The Prizes: We are very thankful to all our sponsors who donated prizes and we also want to apologize to a few of the winners. We failed to mention a turn around time and did a poor job of updating some of you on this. The majority of the prizes were delivered right away because they were digital but a few were physical products and take time to get processed. We PROMISE all prizes will be delivered
7. So would we do it again? Absolutely yes… we of course would do a few thing different but being through this once opened our eyes to a few things and we loved it.
Last of All THANK YOU! We truly mean that… THANK YOU TO ALL OUT LOYAL READERS… There are so many of you that have emailed and commented on how the cowpetition was a great learning experiance for you and all we can say is THANKS!
So overall what was your opinion of the whole thing, good or bad… but we prefer the good 
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