Our good friends (and clients) at Vancity are running a contest on ChangeEverything.ca. The $500 first prize is great, but the cool thing about it as far as I’m concerned is, it’s the ideal way for a beginner to dip their toes into the blogging waters.

Here’s how the Viva la resolution! contest works in five easy steps:

1. You sign up on the site. (It’s free, and no salesperson will call.)
2. You decide on a resolution – something you want to change in 2007 about yourself, your community or your world.
3. You blog on the site about your progress in making that change and include the tag (i.e. keyword) “resolution”.
4. A panel of judges checks out your resolution and blog posts, and picks out the top three resolutions.
5. If yours is one of them, you walk away with a $50, $100 or $500 Visa gift card.

So why’s it ideal for a beginning blogger? Here are five handy reasons:

• ChangeEverything.ca is a friendly community. Your chances of getting helpful, supportive comments are excellent.
• It takes just seconds to set up a blog, and you have an instant built-in readership: the hundreds of other members of ChangeEverything.ca, and the thousands of visitors to the site.
• Site moderator Kate Dugas is happy to help you if you run into a roadblock.
• If you made New Year’s resolutions, you have built-in fodder for writing blog posts.
• A $500 Visa gift card would be a pretty good reward for a first outing.

So if you know someone who’s been itching to start blogging, this could be the ticket. (And feel free to download the poster [PDF, 250kb] for the contest if you want to spread the word.)