Think Outside the Cow Pen and Cattle Drive Your Traffic
Blogging can be hard work and having a lot of visitors to your blog is one of the best ways to feel rewarded for your hard work. Sometimes, though, getting a good number of loyal readers can feel like an up hill battle. Sometimes, just writing good articles is not enough. Here are a few things you can do to increase your readership quickly and without breaking your budget.
Have a contest
If you’re a blogger on a budget, you may think that you can’t pull off a great contest to promote your blog, but it’s easier than you may think. To offer a great contest that will get people participating you need to follow some rules of thumb:
- Work out all the details before announcing your contest.
- Only offer what you are ready to provide to your winner.
- Make entering as easy as possible.
- Offer various ways to enter.
The most important things to focus on are the prizes and the ways to enter. Prizes can be tricky if you don’t have a big budget, but if you get creative, you’ll find that you have a lot to offer. Try offering ad space on your blog, a 200 word review, or a spot in your blog roll. Offer all three to make it interesting. If you have a valuable skill other than writing, offer it up. Graphic designers can offer logo or theme creation services. Web developers can offer development services. You get the idea. What else can you offer? Better still, think about what an company might offer that you can give away for them? I suggested this very recently to a fellow blogger who managed to land some product promotions for his upcoming contest. The more creative you are, the less you will have to empty your own pockets for your contest.
Don’t make your contest impossible to enter. As amazing as your prizes may be, people are busy and don’t want to spend a long time entering your contest. Let your reader earn entries for actions as simple as posting a comment or writing a post on their own blog about your contest. The number of entries you give your reader for an action should be relative to both the time and effort involved and the value that action hold for you. One thing that will help convince people to write about your contest is to do most of the work for them. In one of my current contests, I created a text file that included the contest image code, the rules, and additional links needed. This made it very easy for people to post about the contest and a lot of people have.
Fill a need and get some links
Keep your ear to the web and look for any way you can fill a need. There’s almost always something that the growing population of bloggers will feel a need for. Develop something new or improve something that already exists to fill a need and take advantage when people notice. Recently, IZEA announced the launch of their new site ranking system called IZEA Real Rank. When it launched, it did so with a basic API and no existing widget to display the live rank of a site. As a developer, that screamed opportunity to me and I quickly created the first live IZEA Real Rank badge. I put that badge on my own blogs, announced it to my network of bloggers on MyBlogLog.com and then emailed IZEA about it. Within a day, a bunch of people were using the badge and IZEA mentioned it in their blog (while answering with their own badge). This benefits me because the badge code includes a link back to my site and a comment asking the blog owner to please include my link with the badge. The result was some very nice compliments combined with a lot of links back to my own blog, and all for only an hour of my time. If you’re not a developer, figure out what service you can offer and then figure out how to use it as a promotional tool. Alternatively, you can hire a developer to build something for you.
Develop a marketing tool that markets you
Would you waste time playing slots? What if I said it was free? What if I said prizes included text links to wherever you want? After Jason Boom handed me the great idea for Entrecard Slots, in which you visit a virtual slot machine for a chance to win credits to use in Entrecard, I decided to expand on it to create what I’m calling Free Ad Slots. The variation simply allows visitors to win text advertising links. For both versions, I created a simple widget and then found that I needed some kind of incentive for bloggers to add this widget to their own blogs. The incentive I decided upon was to match any jackpot a visitor hit to the site that sent them. This addition to my blog took about three hours to create both versions and after only a couple days, both have been used significantly, and many people have included the widget in their own blogs. Think of something you can offer your readers that is fun or entertaining, gives back to them, and offers some form of incentive for them to help you promote it.
Thinking outside the box has doubled my traffic and readership, gained me about 60 inbound links, and increased my brand recognition all in the space of a month. Creative promotions have far outweighed paid campaigns that I have tried in the past and have kept my wallet just a little fatter at the same time. Get creative and get more readers.
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Hey Joe,
You`ve got a really solid post here. I especially liked your point about making it easy to enter your blog contest. Some contests have so many requirements to enter, that I just don`t bother. One has to remember that people need an easy way to do things. We`ve seen some great success stories from contests in the past. Prime example: Winning the Web (although there was a lot of money involved).
Keep up the good work,
Hafiz Dhanani
Hafiz: Thanks. I was actually just getting some things prepared to wrap up my January contests when I noticed traffic coming from this post. I’m glad you liked it.
Great post Joe. I must admit I haven’t been up to date lately with new posts
-Mike
Congrats on your guest post, Joe. It was a great read. Contests can be a strange beast — one time they work wonders and the next they fall flat. Your advice was sound throughout. Thanks for the link too.
Thanks, Mike.
Jason: Thanks for the comment. I thought you might enjoy the link.
Very nice Joe, especially the “filling a need” section. It just shows how a little creativity can take you a long way! Great job.
I’d also encourage any blogger to gain a little web development knowledge if possible (php for example), as it can open a lot of doors, in and out of the blogosphere.
Just as a quick example, 18 months ago I didn’t know what an html tag was, let alone anything else. After some playing around with existing scripts, which gradually led on to full scale development, I recently got offered 2 jobs within large UK businesses, in no small part due to the skills I was able to demonstrate as a result of my web development work!
Nice post and really like the ideas.
Good stuff. And we specialize in bovines.
Nice post Joe. With my recent redirection of my contest blog to a resource for blog owners, I have a few great articles that will help blog owners who are thinking of running blog contest. Things like How to convince sponsor to sponosr your blog contest and How to structure your blog contest for better SEO.
[...] John Cow [...]
Nice post Joe Tech. You definitely gave away some solid tips!
This is one of a great post by you. and i love to read this one..thanks keep it up
thanks for sharing.. at least i got ideas now.
If anyone needs any widgets or sites holler at me
I am trying to think of a contest… Not sure what I will do.
I think the part about giving a review with the ad buttons is definitely a good idea.
Simon: A little creativity CAN go far. It doesn’t take much to rise above the norm and do something different. Great example, too.
Start Blogging: Thanks
Andrew: I hope I didn’t give too much away.
Thanks, Cashmarble!
Limadang: Thanks. I hope you can put some of the ideas to use.
Blog Contest Central: There’s so much more you can do, too. Just let me know if you want more ideas.
Keith: You’re doing it all wrong. You’re thinking ON TOP of the box. Hop off and take a few steps away and try again.
Nice work on the guest post Joe and nice tips. Good to hear your getting rewarded for your efforts.
[...] The cow has been away on vacation, so most of the posts on John Cow dot com have been written by guests. On January 30th, Joe Tech wrote a really good blog entry about how to bring traffic to your blog. He talks about having contests, getting links, and developing marketing tools. Think Outside the Cow Pen and Cattle Drive Your Traffic. [...]
This is very funny! But I don’t want to spin the thing only once a day. Why not more? People could get addicted to it very easily
Neil: Thanks. This past week alone has actually been a whirl-wind of good things for JoeTech.com, which I won’t go into here, but good stuff is happening.
Your work is really inspiring john!! Advice coming from you is worth listening!!
These tips are very useful for blogger if they want to get more traffics.
I found this post really useful, especially as I’m planning a competition very soon. It definitely makes sense to plan ahead to avoid putting people off entering, and to have an appropriate and attractive prize to offer.
A while ago I had a mini competition on my personal blog, and the winner still hasn’t told me where to send her toy monkey!
[...] it out of the way first. I started out with a fair amount of traffic, but lately, I’ve been increasing my traffic quite a bit in a variety of ways. Many of my efforts focus on Entrecard, so I get a lot of good [...]
I like the contest idea. Really good worth trying out.
Contests bring in lots of readers. I try to do one every month or so.
Usman Money: If you do one, come back and let us know how it went.
Affiliate Confession: I was trying to remember how I found your site, so I headed over and I’ve already found 2 more articles I want to read later. I guess that’s was RSS feeds are for.