This is a guest post by Akira who loves earning money online and dreams to be a successful Internet Marketer.
Blog promotion can be done by mean of paid promotion or free promotion. Example of free promotion includes guest blogging and blog walking. Meanwhile, paid promotion can be done by direct advertising, pay per click etc. But, there is an effective way of blog promotion that only a few blogger know about it or try to do. The promotion technique is called contest.
Contest is an activity where you provide an award to the lucky participant who did what you ordered. We cannot put contest in either paid promotion or free promotion category since the prize of the contest might be sourced from our own pocket or from sponsors. But instead of discussing it here, I would like to discuss the effectiveness of contest to promote your blog.
The Power of Contest
The effectiveness of contest depends on the purpose of the promotion. Are you promoting to move your Google page-rank up, to multiply the amount of comments, to increase the total number of incoming visitors, or to look for a word of mouth promotion for your website. Thus, selecting the type of a contest is very important. Before we talk about how to create a good contest, let’s take a look at illustration below:
The above illustration is an example of one of contest information organized by a blog about movie review. What can you conclude from the above illustration? The contest in that blog is organized for the purpose to produce word of mouth of that blog. The result is very effective. The indicator of the result is the total of 715 incoming comments.
Ok, if you have not understood, I will try to explain utilizing the above example. In the illustration we can see that the total number of incoming comments is 715 comments.
Do you know that the article is a contest where the participant has a chance to win Apple iPad 64GB with a condition that they have to create tweets or facebook share about that blog. Let’s say that not all of the incoming comments come from people who are interested to participate, so let’s take only 20%.
We can imagine that with a contest, this blog has got 20% x 715 = 143 tweets or facebook share directed to that blog. At the end, certainly it will affect the popularity of our blog or even increase the rank in terms of Google Pagerank. I call it as “The Power Of Contest.”
Will Every Contest Achieve Its Purpose?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. I frequently see forum posting contests or blog promotion contests with very few participants. It is because of the lack of knowledge in creating a good contest. Below are some brief and secret tips so that any contest you arrange will successfully achieve its purpose…
Brief And Confidential Tips To Create Successful Contest
1. Select A Type Of Contest That Suits Your Promotion Purpose
The above illustration is an example of a blog who creates a contest with an intention to get word of mouth for that blog. Contest of tweeting and facebook share is the right choice to incredible viral marketing. When Smartbloggerz hold Commenting Contest, the incoming comments to this blog was in the amount of thousands. Therefore, selection of the contest type is very important.
2. Offer Attractive Prizes
The bigger and more the prize offered, the more people would get enthusiastic to participate in your contest. The prize offered should not always come from you. You can find a sponsor who is willing to provide the winning prize for the contest concluded in your blog or forum, of course by returning a benefit to that sponsor, such as by providing sponsorship credits etc.
FIRST SECRET: Contest with a cash reward is more appealing than other type of reward.
3. Promote Your Contest At The Right Spot
Promoting your contest is crucial to let a lot of people know about the contest, so that they are interested to participate. Promoting a contest in other blog or forum that has few visitors is a waste of time. Promote in a forum that has a lot of member or other blog that is having a lot of visitors.
SECOND SECRET: Do you know that on the internet, there are some people who actively participate in online contests? I call them “Treasure Hunter”. Typically they have a specific blog that publishes information about contests in the internet. You can contact them, and they will gladly publish the information about your contest in their blog.
4. Completeness Of Information About Your Contest
Ensure that all the information about your contest is complete. People will get less enthusiastic if the information about your contest is not clear. What I mean by information is: how to participate, the prizes offered, the deadline of contest, when and how the contest winner will be announced. By providing this information completely, people will think that you are serious in executing the contest.
Last Words…
By adhering to the above-mentioned tips and secrets, I am sure that your contest will be an effective one and will achieve its purpose. I have seen a blog that organized a promotion contest. That blog had a page rank of 0. But, after the contest ended and Google updated its Page Rank; that blog got a Page Rank of 2. It is incredible, isn’t it? Hence, promote your blog through contest in an effective using the tips mentioned in this post.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• promotion
I think the contest is not only effective way to promote your blog (in purpose to get a backlink), but also effective in terms of time. We could get 700 + links as above by blogwalking, forum signatures, etc., but not within 1-4 weeks. With the contest, we get two benefits, 1st “getting a lot of links” and 2nd “it’s in a short time”. Another power of contest.
Contest or which can be called as a competition or giveaway is being used by a lot of bloggers lately. So I am not sure with the statement “only A few bloggers know about it or try to do”. This technique seems start to become popular. I agree if a statement is changed to “only A few bloggers know about the tips and secret to make contest”.
But it is true, some contests are not attracted a lot of participants when I see the prize is not too bad. Their just not read this article yet *haha*
Good work, akira07.
The contest was very effective to make your blog be known by many people. Imagine, for winning the contest that we make, the participants is such as “workers” that collect links to our blog, even while we sleep. This is truly extraordinary.
But to be honest I’ve never seen a contest participants reached more than 700 people such as you provide in example. It’s very “wow”.
This is a “smart tips” on the blog “smart bloggerz”. In my place, most bloggers advertise in the local PPC. Competition in the local PPC is so tight, so the method of contest is a surprise for me. Moreover, I believe, most local bloggers did not know this method. It’s a good info for me 🙂
Therefore, thank you.
If i make a contest, do you want to be my sponsor?
The contest is an investment. Could fail and could succeed also. If it fails, time and energy will be wasted. If successful, the number of incoming links is for you. And such investments, the risk of failure can be minimized. So the investment term “high risk high return” does not apply. How to minimize it? Read this article. Thx
I just learned about the contest which is intended for blog promotion. At first, I think a contest on the internet is just for fun.
The bad news, this article could make a lot of blogger make the contest. In the end, my contest get less participants, because I know many bloggers have more money to provide interesting prize. LOL
Nice article dude
Well, nice post, I agreed. Yes, contest is an effetive way to raise more expossure from the audience of the web. But, it could be a fault when the contest being held doesn’t have corelation to the main topic of the blog.
Do you mean design blog should always make design contest, or SEO blog should hold SEO contest? Why it should always related?
I had the idea of holding a contest of my own a few days ago, but I forgot about it before too long. Your post has not only reminded me of the idea, but it has also inspired me with a few ideas. Thank you.
Nice looking blog, by the way. 🙂
Robert Wenger
The contest is one type of best way to promote a blog. But beginner blogger can’t conduct the contest because they were lacking of money. If they had monthly income they can start the contest from beginning itself otherwise they need to wait until you having the monthly income. I am saying this by personal experience.
But i think a blog which already earn a stable amount of money didn’t need to make a contest because i’m sure their have a lot of traffic already. Contest is very perfect tricks to drive traffic for new blog. But yes, lack of money is a problem. But i think if the problem is a money, there is a lot of ways to solve it.
Contest on Blogs really attracts Visitors the contest that is related to the Blog Topic should be held so that maximum potential readers of the blog would follow the contest
Last contest i participated was Article Contest which held by article directory website, it’s related to topic and they claim thar their website traffic increased by 77%. Not bad, and it’s another proof of contest effectiveness. I won it and get internet modem 😛