How To Hold A Successful Blog Contest

The very first question should be raised here. Will a contest help your blog? Sure it will.

Basically, a contest is another form of blog promotion. Giving away prizes to contest winners can attract new visitors. Your RSS subscribers increase in a very short period and bring in more comments. Contest can do this, contest can do that. Well yes, its usefulness has been proven many times. So, in this post, I'll point out everything you need to produce a successful blog contest. I'll list some cautions and possible negative effects as well.

PLAN YOUR TIME & GOALS

Unlike other forms of promotion, a contest means more work for you --- before, during and after the contest. When you buy a text link you just need to pay and make sure it appears on the other blog. For a reciprocal link, you put the other blog's link on yours, check your link on theirs and be done with it.

For the beginning of the contest, you will need to decide what goal you want to achieve. Setting your goal is important, as it will affect the contest mechanics and time frame for sure. The goal also drives the budget (size of prizes). Here is a list of the most popular goals -- most contest have a least two:

1. Increase the number of comments.
This is by far the most popular goal for a contest. People are usually willing to comment of your blog, since it's easy and of course, it helps your blog. If you want to increase the number of comments on particular post, just list it as one of the qualifiers for the contest. Some people use a top commenter widget to count the number of comments across all posts.

2. Increase the number of RSS Subscribers.
It’s pretty much self explanatory. Participants must sign up by email. However, many people will unsubscribe after the contest ends. This is pretty natural, so to decrease the impact, write good posts when your contest's running as this is the best time to convert them to regular readers. They will still subscribe when the contest has ended.

3. Get a linkback/ link building.
If there are many inbound links to your blog, it will help your Page Rank considerably. So, a contest is a great way to make many inbound links. By requiring people to blog about your contest, they are forced to put a link on their blog pointing to your blog. However, there are also many potential participants that don't want to do this and thus, they withdraw. A blog's PR rank can be hurt by too many links from unrelated blogs. Consider this carefully before you decide to make link building a goal of your contest.

4. Get dig on Digg, stumbled on StumbleUpon and faved on Technorati.
This is commonly used as a optional requirement for extra contest entries. If your post gets several dig, stumble or fave recognitions, you could get many visitors. Some of them will read the rest of your blog. You can hit two birds with one stone.

5. To celebrate something.
Want to celebrate your blog's anniversary or any event in your real life? If that's so, a contest is a good way to do it. People also time their contest promotion around holidays like Halloween or Valentine's day.

Now that you've set your goals, you need to create a post and display your contest mechanics. These are the steps participants must take to qualify and earn points. The most common contest mechanics are (but not limited to):

• Subscribe to your blog RSS by feed reader or email,
• comment on particular post on your blog,
• put your contest banner/text link on participant's blog
• submission on social networking sites (digg, stumbleupon etc)
• write about your contest on participant's blog.

The right contest mechanics can ensure the success of your contest. Make it easy for participants, while meeting your goals. Set one or two required steps, like 'Subscribe to your blog and 'comment on particular post on your blog.' Make the rest optional to gain extra entries.

Next comes the least trivial thing about holding a contest. What is it? Of course, finding sponsors who offer those great prizes!

To get sponsors, spread the word about your planned contest. You can post on Entrecard and Blog Catalog forums to get instant attention. People there are usually nice enough to give away their resources to sponsor contest. I myself am one of the sponsors for the Christmas and New Year contest, and it's a pretty big one too.

Without a doubt, you can sponsor your own contest, but it will lack the variety of prizes. Unless you have planned your contest long enough, you usually won't have lots of interesting prizes to attract people. You need to put into consideration about how many people will be selected as winners. Will it be four, ten or twenty winners? After you decide the number of winners, then you can start finding sponsors. The larger the number of the winners, the more attractive your contest is. You could also give away consolation prizes, although it would make your blog contest more expensive.

These are the prizes that contests usually offer:

1. Money
Duh....money is still the most interesting prize for drawing participants. The larger sum offered, the bigger buzz of the contest is.... If you can attract many sponsors to invest their money here on your contest, you can expect great results. As interesting as it is, there won’t be many people willing to donate it to sponsor your contest. You need to prove to them that your contest is really worth it. They have their own goals to meet as sponsors--- backlinks, new visitors, etc.

2. Free 125x125 ad slot for certain duration
This is a cheap prize, but many people will be glad to give this prize to you. The minimal duration should be two weeks. Less than two weeks, it’s not sufficient and can hardly be called a sponsorship. Moreover, check the sponsor first, make sure they’re trustworthy enough (e.g. they’re not a spam blog). Getting sponsor’s credibility is also an important task, isn’t it? You would not want to run the risk of holding a poor quality contest, would you?

3. Free text link ad slot for certain duration
(read #2)

4. Blog review
If you decide to give this prize by yourself, this will put extra work after your contest ends. It’s strongly recommended to ask for your sponsors to make reviews for contest winners, that way you will not be backlogged with the job. Don’t underestimate review tasks; it isn’t that easy unless you only want to write simple reviews. Then again, this is a contest so you should give away high quality reviews.

5. Entrecard Credit
This is practically easy to collect. All you need to do is to post on Entrecard forum, and let it run for few days. If you made interesting topic title and mechanics, as listed on your post there, people will join and sponsor your contest easily; there are many Entrecarders who are willing to give away thousand of credits. Collect as many as you can. If it’s enough, spread it into smaller parts so you can give consolation prizes.

6. Premium template
This is rather difficult to get. You might want to contact WordPress template developers who need a little publicity. If you manage to get one, it will be a huge boost for your overall prizes, since WordPress templates are widely valued.

7. E-book
An e-book isn’t easy to make, and it’s not too interesting as a prize either. Unless you have a very rare e-book, don’t make it as your main prize. But nonetheless, it adds value to your prize collection.

8. Free domain name
Among bloggers, there are still many of them that don’t use their own domain to host their blogs. So, offering free domain names for a prize would be highly appreciated. Get at least one if you plan to host a major contest.

Done collecting prizes? Now what should you do next...? You have to spread the word. Drop a word about it on the usual social media sites and forums. Leave a link to your contest thread on other blogs. Be careful though; don’t overdo it lest you be regarded as a spammer. Submitting it on contest sites would be great as well. In the end, promoting the contest is no different than promoting your blog or a specific post.

All things must come to an end, including your contest. To help you decide on the winners, you can try random.org website. It can select a random number of emails from a list you provide. Anyone with extra points would appear multiple time in your list. Once you’ve selected the winners, you need to distribute the prizes as promised. Don’t be remiss and forget anything here, since it’s a very important step in your contest.

You might want to also write down everything to leave a record for yourself in the future. That record will be the basis of your future contest, or when you sponsor another blogger’s contest. Oh, maybe you will ask ‘what do I get for sponsoring other contests?’. The answer is, it will help build your own reputation, and get a back link.

If you do it right, contests can be your strongest power when it comes to promoting your blog. The downside of a contest is, it can take away a lot of your time and as a result, you can’t write many quality posts. Make sure you're written a few and schedule them for the contest period. Be ready ... prepare everything carefully before the contest.

Visitor bounce rates can be pretty high too while holding a contest. This is perfectly normal but for…stats freak, it will be very unpleasant thing to see. Expect to see your blog feed subscribers disappear after the contest as many people see nothing more to gain after that contest ends.

Well then, what are you waiting for, go plan your next contest! If you have any previous experiences on holding a contest, share it here so we can help each other.

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Be sure to also read:
Blog Promotion: Quick and simple steps

photos by shadphotos, athena1970