Just over a year ago, group writing projects were all the rage!  Sites like ProBlogger.net and DailyBlogTips.com ran them and got hundreds of participants.   Then nothing…..

For whatever reason, over this past year I don’t think I’ve seen a single group writing project, at least until now.   My friend Mayank over at Blog Design Studio has announced an excellent group writing project with a ton of great prizes, including a Blog Design Studio redesign!

Here is the official prize list:

1. Win a custom WordPress theme for your blog from Blog Design Studio
2. Premium Theme from DailyBlogTips.com
3. Consultation from Kevin Muldoon (BloggingTips.com)
4. Consultation from Mayank

If you’d like to enter into this group writing project, you’ll want to write a post about Blog Design and follow these guidelines:

• The article should be fresh and new. An old blog post will not be eligible for the contest.
• The blog post should be at least 250 words long.
• Give a link back the sponsors as mentioned at the bottom of the post.
• Don’t forget to send an e-mail to us with the link to your contest entry {hello (at) blogdesignstudio (dot) com}.
• Your blog should be at least one month old & should have at least 30 entries.
• Your entry should come before 30th November (doesn’t matter which time zone, it should be 30th Nov.)

Any other questions?  For more information, you’ll want to refer to their announcement post.

If you’ve ever run a Group Writing Project before, you probably know that they can generate a lot of traffic and a large number of inbound links if done properly.   They can also help you to introduce yourself to a large number of potential readers that you might not have otherwise met.   Running these projects, however, are often more work than you bargained for when you decided to host one.  It can often be a headache to manage your submissions and collect all the posts into one place for publishing.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to do be this way if you are a WordPress user.  The WP-Submission WordPress plugin was created for situations like this, where you want to accept submissions for something.   This plugin will actually create a submission form that you can refer participants to.  As entries are submitted, a post draft is automatically created and continues to add additional submissions to the end of your post draft until your contest is completed.  You can then edit your post to say/look how you want, and then publish your list of participants.

If you don’t intend to run a group writing project, Jason Blanton has made a post over at Blogging Tips suggesting some alternative uses for this plugin.   It would also be a good fit for people hosting Blog Carnivals and Link Round Ups.