These days, a lot of blogs are holding contests. It’s a trend that bloggers are quick to adopt because of the benefits they could get out of it. That’s because a blog contest is a powerful marketing tool to get blogs better exposure. Get more traffic, backlinks, readers, Technorati ranking, etc; it’s all about increasing blog stats to improve your blog’s authority.
What’s a blog contest?
A blog contest is just your usual online contest that is conducted by blogs to build publicity, recognition, and/or networks. A blog contest cannot be a contest without prizes. These prizes range from entrecard credits to real cash, gadgets, advertising spots, reviews, and other valuable online merchandise and services you could think of. Getting entries to win usually requires a participant to do some things that will benefit the contest host and his/her blog.
How do you benefit from holding blog contests?
Your blog can benefit from a contest in a lot of ways depending on your contest’s rules/mechanics and how well you promoted it; but generally, these are the areas where you’ll see much improvement and what most contest runners hope to improve after conducting it:
- More backlinks
- Increased Google, Technorati, and Alexa rankings
- More readers (subscribers and return visits)
- More traffic
How to Setup a Blog Contest?
Running a contest is not as easy as it looks. It requires a lot of effort to coordinate with everyone you want to get involved from its conception to the handing-over of prizes to the winners. If you’re planning of running one, here’s a guide which could help you.
There are 4 aspects to keep in mind when you decide to run a blog contest:
- Your goals
- The prizes
- The game mechanics
- Promotion
Goals
You don’t just hold a contest with nothing in mind. Think first of what you hope to achieve after conducting the contest, which will determine the competition’s success. It could be increasing your RSS subscribers, increasing your backlinks, increasing your stats, and any blog related increase you have in mind. Once you have your goals, you can then make better decisions around the competition format, prizes, promotion etc.
Prizes
Generally, the bigger your prizes are, the more buzz you’ll potentially make but it all depends on how much you’re willing to spend for your contest and how many sponsors you’ll get. If you’re not very experienced when it comes to marketing your ideas or is fairly new to blogging, it’s best to keep your prizes simple but useful.
Don’t give prizes that your contestants have no use for or you’ll end up with few or no participants at all. The best prizes are those relevant to your niche to hook up contestants that will better appreciate them. For many blogger contestants, entrecard credits are always a way to go, but you have to put the non-entrecarders into consideration as well. Cash is often the best form of prize but always try to come up with a considerably better value since a mere $10 will brand your contest as cheap. Regarding blogging tools, e-books, services, and other products; it’s best to put their monetary value as well so everyone will see how much they’re worth.
Read the rest of blog contest…