All New CommentMILK Version 1.0Nuke The Blogosphere With Your Very Own Contest
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*Lost episode 4 now online :)*
Before we begin, I’d like to apologize to all John Cow readers. You see, I tried and tried before I wrote this post - pretty hard in fact, but I have failed you all. My extreme apologies…. at not being able to come up with a suitable cow pun. You see, all the other guest posters before me milked the puns for all they were worth, and with their fast mooves, I was just unable to compete 
. Hopefully though, the post I’m about to provide you will help make up for the sadness you felt when you saw the lack of ‘cattle’, ‘farm’, ‘cow’ and ‘moonetize’ in this post’s title.
A lot of you have blogs. The majority of you I’d wager, and those that don’t probably thought of doing so at least once in their online lives. Online blogs are a way of getting your thoughts out and projected to hundreds (or in the Cow’s case, thousands) of prospective readers - readers that may have known nothing about you until that glorious day that they stumbled across your online ramblings.
I have a sad truth for you though - the majority of online blogs fail. Sure, a large part of that is due to rubbish content (how often have you come across a blogger that types in txt spk? 
) but there are a lot of bloggers that started out, continued to produce quality content on a consistent basis and gave up because they had few visitors, and even less comments. You see, bloggers blog to form a community, to interact with their readers - without that, there is no real purpose to your writing.
The reason most blogs fail is because they don’t market their websites enough. Yes, you can keep producing quality - every single day, in fact but if no one knows about it, you’re not getting anywhere. There are plenty of ways to market a website, most of which I’m sure you’ve heard about - you could write a guest post on some of the bigger blogs, do the whole gaming of social networking sites, and even promote your website heavily on forums, but what about the bloggers that just don’t have the time to do so? For them, contests are the way forward - and that’s what I’ll be talking about in today’s post.
You see, all people - young or old, short or tall, thin or fat… they may have a lot of differences, but the one thing all people have in common is that they love free stuff. Sure, the stuff has to be useful, but everyone loves free stuff, and not just that - winning it. Handing a person something free is one thing, but telling them that they won it out of ten, twenty, one hundred or more… that’s something that’ll make them feeling pretty happy with life. Contests are a great way of generating buzz in the blogosphere, and that’s one of, if not the best way you can start off a traffic frenzy to a new blog.
All you have to do is look at a few live examples in the online world of blogging to see just how successful a well created contest is… the Cow, as one of the best examples has something up for grabs for his readers nearly every single week, and that (along with the various acts of link bait 
) has contributed greatly to him racking up 1,300 readers in only ten or so months. Another great example is Gyutae Park of Winning The Web - his first contest had the innovative idea of decoding a word string to win a review on John Chow (and John Cow later), followed up with his second contest of beating Tyler Cruz in some sort of beauty blogger paegant (heck, he got my vote) helped him near 400 RSS subscribers so far and ever increasing.
You just have to look at a few of the contest blogs to keep track - nearly every day a new one starts, and if promoted and marketed the right way, you can not just send visitors (that will convert to readers, commenters and subscribers) but also leave an imprint in the memory of those that surf the common blogs - the next time they hear the name of your blog, they’ll go ‘Hey, wasn’t that the site that gave away $xxx/free t-shirts/advertising spots last week? I gotta check it out!’
What prizes should I give away and how do I get them?
There are a multitude of prizes you could give away - advertising such as banners and reviews, eBooks, Wordpress themes and even cold hard cash. The one thing you’ve got to do is make those prizes useful - a high quality Wordpress theme, for example is something any blogger can use (or give away on their blog if they don’t need it) - an eBook on fish farming when you’re aiming to reach bloggers in the ‘make money online’ niche will not be of much help.
Quite a few of you will have private label content sitting on your hard drive that you can dish out, and the money - well, you could take it out of your montly budget, or work hard to get it if you don’t have it, but a great way of getting prizes of top end quality is simply by asking. You might remember a recent contest held by Bloggin-Ads, where he used the Entrecard message system to send a quick one asking probably every single user in his related niche for prizes - racking up more than fifty donated prizes, a lot of them pretty useful.
Remember, if you ask politely, and speak about the exposure they’ll get by donating, most bloggers will be happy to offer up something, no matter how minor - and you might even get some links to help promote your contest from them as a helping hand.
Contest rules?
This post is pretty long now, and most of you have gone to sleep, but last thing before I go - I promise! Most contests will be started to aim on increasing various metrics for a blogger - traffic (Alexa rank), subscribers (RSS) and backlinks (Google Pagerank) but you should make it as easy as possible to enter - if you require your visitors to jump through too many hoops, they’re simply going to ignore your contest. Remember, whilst you may want backlinks, requiring it to enter will rule out many of your readers that don’t have blogs of their own - the less rules you have, the more people are likely to enter. In my contest for example, all I required were comments and an email subscription - nothing too difficult, and thus I’m getting lots of interested parties.
That’s all for now - good luck if you decide to start up your own contest, and remember - you can make it happen.
So, how many links are we allowed in this little blurb? 
Anyways, I’m Jason Pereira, who blogs at The University Kid - the name speaks for itself. I’m currently running a contest of my own that gives out $150 amongst other things in prizes; feel free to check it out. Oh yeah - subscribe to the feed if you haven’t! 
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I will post this comment now before i fall to sleep(lol)
Great read i enjoyed it. I am currently running a contest on my blog the main prize being 3 months FREE banner ad
Marketing Blog’s last blog post..Free Traffic For Your New Website
Nice post; however, when you said “Anyways, I’m Jason Pereira, who blogs at The University Kid - the name speaks for itself.” I actually didn’t know what that meant so I had to go check out your blog to find out. (I suppose this is a good thing, but I just got a little confused
).
In any case, yes far too many people will start a blog only to give up when things don’t look good.
Chris Guthrie’s last blog post..Save time by using a password management program
Nice post!
Now if only someone gave away free beer money every week… oh wait!
I do!
Stewart
HowToMakeMoneyOnline.ca
Stewart Reynolds’s last blog post..Free Beer Money Contest Winner - Feb 22 2008
Great post
I tried this idea on one of my other blogs (http://chocolatedogblog.com/) over Christmas and it was a great success with little work.
I had the biggest page views ever because of people wanting to win a book.
I highly recommend this idea.
cuzzy’s last blog post..Versus - Sexiest Survivor gal
Nice post! A contest idea JUST popped into my head as I was reading this post, and I can’t wait to put it in action in a week or so.
News Notion’s last blog post..My Blog Design is Ugly
Holding a contest has a downside too….you may not get the bang for your buck. Many will just sign up to your feed then unsubscribe (thats what I would do). It seems the blogging world has become flooded with Blogging SEO & Monetizing.
Also you have the exact same layout as the cow??? As do others I come to find. Why not edit some of the widgets/post boxes to make it unique?
Great post. A contest isn’t necessarily an easy option for a new blogger, as it will take some time and hard work to get the word out.
However, it just so happens that I’m currently giving away a Premium WordPress Theme on my site, in case anyone’s interested.
PJ’s last blog post..Win a WTM Premium Theme
Nice post, What is this plugin in the comments section that links to the last blog post?
Will it work for me, lets see:
A contest, especially a big one can be pretty difficult for come up with for a new blogger. As you said, it’s best to ask people for prizes through EntreCard, MyBlogLog etc in return for linking to them and mentioning them in a few posts.
Ruchir Chawdhry’s last blog post..7 Things I Hate About Blogging
Jason, I do appreciate and want to thank you for including me in this post
-Mike
Mike Huang’s last blog post..Continue To Do What You Do
as long as you tried thats all what matters
Syed Balkhi’s last blog post..Business Deal 101
Agreed, but what if some start a contest then never give away the prize?
So now I just need to get together a network of people to ask if they can donate prizes. I’m going to work on this one. Nice idea.