Expert Tips on Creating a Blog Contest

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Blog contests can be a fun way to reward visitors for coming back to your blog and visiting more than just once. After all, everyone loves the idea of winning some free stuff in a contest. Blog contests can also be an excellent way to build popularity and bring more traffic to your site easily.

Types of Contests

There are so many different types of contests that it would be impossible to list them all, but there are some that can really help increase your traffic and boost visitor enjoyment of your blog at the same time.

Simple contest entries could be some of the following:

-    Subscribe to your RSS feed. Offer a prize for two or three random new subscribers.
-    Subscribe to your newsletter. Offer a prize for some random new newsletter subscribers
-    Leaving a helpful comment on one of your posts. A contest offering prizes for great comments encourages more reader feedback.
-    Best blog post. Advertise your contest and let people know you’ll offer a prize for the person who writes the best blog post about it on their own blog.
-    Treasure Hunt. People love to hunt around for things especially if there’s a prize involved. Give simple clues that lead to older posts on your blog and make the answers easy to find. This gets people digging around in the older sections and keeps them on your site.

Easy Contests

People are basically lazy. Make sure the conditions of your contest entry are easy and quick. Perhaps you want them to subscribe to your RSS feed or become a subscriber to your newsletter in order to qualify for the contest. These are easy actions and most people will be fine with this.

If you ask them to do too much, they’ll simply get bored or not bother with your contest at all.

Finding Prizes

Some contest promoters pay for the prizes offers in contests and competition, but if your budget doesn’t allow for this, there are ways to find people who will donate prizes for you.

You could directly approach different companies or organizations and ask them for contest prizes. Make sure you offer plenty of links back to their site as thanks.

Joint Ventures between online marketers are quite common to get people to donate products too. Several major internet marketing forums are home to some of the biggest ‘gurus’ around, but you’ll also find many up and coming new entrepreneurs wanting some exposure and some way to let people know about their products. Offering a joint venture between your blog contest and an internet marketer with a product to promote could be ideal.

Be sure you aim at prizes that your audience will enjoy. The prizes should either reflect your blog topic or should suit your blog’s target demographic.

Advertising Your Blog Contest

There are websites around that will list different online contests for you. You could submit your site to these to get you started, but they won’t create a big enough buzz to affect your traffic numbers.

Take a little time to leave a few comments on other blogs similar to yours and mention your contest. People love to tell other people about any great sites they’ve found, so once you’ve managed to attract some attention with your contest, people will automatically begin to tell others and link to your contest on their own blogs. This is word of mouth advertising and it’s very effective when it’s done correctly.