Nose to Nose Finalists: You Can and Should Be One

I’m a fan of awards shows. I watch all of them. I love the pomp and circumstance. I love the Step and Repeat (that great big banner everyone pauses in front of to get their picture taken, often with some star or another). I love the speeches. Yep, I’m a sucker for awards shows.

It goes without saying, then, that I am a big fan of the BlogPaws Nose to Nose Finalists and the awards dinner we put on every year. The amount of work involved is beyond measure, but the reward at the end of the work makes everyone shine. In the early days of BlogPaws, we decided to host an awards event at our conference to recognize the truly hard work our bloggers put into their craft. Because the quality of that work can vary, from blog to blog, and category to category, each blogger is judged on their own merit, according to the specific requirements of the category. This means your work is judged on the merits as noted in the criteria created, yes, by us, at BlogPaws.

You can see the criteria for each category on the Nose to Nose Awards page. You can see a list of committee people, those who worked on the Nose to Nose awards, including legal folk, judges, our team, and others we may have asked help from. We did our best to create a way to show recognition and to reward hard work to the blog and individual, not by asking them to get their followers to vote, nor by comparing them to each other, but by looking carefully at each entry from each blogger, and using our best criteria of that entry, to assign a score. Mind you, we do not judge or score the entries. We, at BlogPaws, merely qualify them.

I did a short video to talk a little about the Nose to Nose Finalists and Awards program. The reason I made this video was to encourage everyone to think now about next year. It’s not too late to start working on your blog with the goal of being a finalist. Can I guarantee you’ll make it into the list by following my advice in this video? You know I can’t. I can’t guarantee anything.

I can say this – back in the early days of blogging, we were focused on teaching. I’m talking about a good many of my early blogging friends who created a blog to support a business. We knew we could share and teach and even learn by posting regularly in our blogs, with the goal of helping possible new clients learn something valuable. Writing well, writing often, and citing sources was also our way of supporting existing clients.

We never considered or wanted awards.

And then, the Webby awards came along. People were beginning to accept the value of Internet content, and of blogging.

It’s been a long road. A hard road, but a worthwhile one.

Our awards at BlogPaws exist to both recognize hard work and talent, but also to inspire. Because the time, the energy, the effort each of us puts into our work online, whether we are doing it from a business perspective or from a personal sharing/teaching perspective, is important and valuable.

I would love comments here. I would love your thoughts on how we can continue to recognize our bloggers for their talent and hard work. Because, it’s not about me or the team, here. It’s about you.

Enjoy my video. Share your thoughts. How will you start preparing for 2017 right now?

Yvonne DiVita is a Co-Founder of BlogPaws. She is dedicated to storytelling and the human-animal bond. When not working on BlogPaws, she writes at Scratchings and Sniffings and The Lipsticking Society. You may contact her at Yvonne@blogpaws.com.