Contest Beat

Are you currently weighing up whether or not to run a contest on your blog? Well stop deliberating and start participating! Blog contests are a fantastic way to generate traffic and backlinks to your site, and if you’re really good create a bit of blogosphere buzz.

Say your blog is one month old. You are getting some traffic, but your Technorati authority is pretty low, you have less than 50 RSS subscribers, and not much activity in terms of posting etc. How do you improve this? Of course there are a number of methods such as link baiting, commenting on other relevant blogs, emailing other blog owners about your posts, but the number 1 guaranteed way to generate more traffic and backlinks (at least in my biased opinion) is to run a contest.

A contest will generally cost you money (unless you’re giving away that dirty old 1st generation iPod, or something similar, or you find a sponsor - hint, hint), but it is also the smartest way you could spend your money. Say you have $50 to spend on your contest, you can either give away the $50 in cash, or find some other cool gadget/device/good/whatever to put up as a prize. If you weren’t running a contest, that $50 might buy you 1-3 text links for one month, might buy you 250-500 targeted vistors via PPC, or might buy you a banner ad for a month - none of these options will really have a long term effect on your blog. Sure, you will get the traffic, but after a month those links are going to be gone.

What do you get for your $50 contest though? Well, a minimum of 10 permanent backlinks (I’d say 10 to 30 is the average), from a varying range of blogs. You get traffic from everyone coming to find out how to enter, or otherwise clicking on other peoples contest entries (which of course link to your site). You get comments; people love to comment on contests, whether they are telling you what a cool prize it is you are giving away, or simply informing you they entered, it’s all activity. And depending on your contest entry requirements you can get a whole heap of other benefits too - feed subscribers, Technorati favoriters, Stumbles, Diggs, MyBlogLog community joins, whatever!

Still need convincing? How about the fact everybody wins? You get your backlinks, traffic, buzz (and more). The winner gets a prize (and they will be stoked), and everyone else who didn’t enter got the thrill of entering the contest for sacrificing one blog post, a comment, a link, whatever. In fact they might even get a backlink from you as the contest runner yourself, if you decide to publicize all those who entered (another hint).

So start planning your first contest today, and if you do, make sure you get it publicized, completely free, right here (sorry for the plug)!