Entries Tagged 'Blog contest howto' ↓

The old adage holds true. Sexiness sells. So why not hold a blog contest to bring some sexiness back to your blog? It does not have to be crass with lots of filth and stuff. In fact, done right, it could alleviate your status when you show your class.

So let’s get down to it.

1. Hold a Sexiness Poll

This would be one of the easiest blog contests to run that is related to sexiness. You probably have some people in mind when the term sexy comes up. So why not pick out 4-6 of them and run it by your readers to see who comes up tops?

Wait, what’s even more interesting, why not run a “Which online personalities are sexiest in their domain” type of contest. If you have the make money domain, people you could include could be the likes of John Chow, Shoemoney and Darren “ProBlogger” Rowse. (Some might say, why not throw in John Cow too?)

2. Have a Photo contest.

Nothing spells sexy better than a visual image. But wait, we want to keep things classy. Have this blog photo contest in a more interesting way. Why not have people interpret sexiness through photos without the element of a nude body? Start people thinking about what is sexy outside of sex.

3. Write a sexy story

We are not talking about erotic fiction here (and no, we don’t need your true life stories either about your conquest). As with the sexy blog photo contest, you might want your contestants to think about what is sexiness and pen it down in words.

In fact, run an extended version of this contest, have your readers participate for the long term. Have a “choose your own adventure” kind of writing contest where your readers can participate but writing a continuation of a sexy story from the week before. Before you know it, you might have a Best Seller in your hands.

4. Let your readers rate you.

Let the fun begin; ask your readers to rate your level of sexiness. In fact, ask them specifically what about you they find sexy. Or if the ratings show you have a lot to improve, ask your readers to post ways to improve your sexiness quotient.

5. Ways to be sexy

Following the above, why not have a blog contest where your readers can give you advice on how to be sexy. This will be quite a popular contest if you have many contestants taking part. And the best part to it is, you’ll also attract lots of readers if you mange to pull this off. So include in big prize money to get the advices flowing.

6. What is sexy when I’m drunk

Have a blog contest that requires your readers to spill the funny beans on what was the funniest thing that happen to them when they are drunk and hooked up with someone. This is sure to bring out some laughs and will also being your some reader traffic.

7. Have a sexy baby blog contest

Everyone is proud to show of their babies. So why not have a blog contest to exploit this area. Have the parents dress the children up in all sorts of outfit ala “Anne Greddes” It’s important to have the parents vote on which is the sexiest – cutest baby.

8. Sexiest Geek Toy around

Have a contest where your readers are able to suggest the sexiest gizmo they think there is out there. But the important point here is that it should be geek toys to keep this contest unique. Suggest to the readers that they might just win their dream gadget and you’ll have a stream of entries coming in.

9. Sexiest parts of the body contest.

Why not have your readers tell you what part of them they think is sexy and the reason why they think so. The obvious part to keep this contest classy is that no mention of boobs and the privates are allowed. Other than that, it should be no holds bar. It’s also interesting to see what people say about their own sexiness.

10. Sexiest way to make money online

Well, we are not talking about the adult web sites industry here. Why not ask your readers what can be done about having a means to project a classy image and making money online in the same vein. You’ll be surprise what people can come up with, especially the folks who have been making money online for some time.

The key thing about a sexy blog contest is that it is meant to create content that appeals to people. There will always be readers out there looking for advice and with the content generated by these contest, you might just be able to attract a whole ton of readers. But the key thing to remember is that you would still have to have other compelling content if you intend for them to stay as your readers. Running a sexy blog contest is just a way of reeling them in.

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1. Not setting a contest end date.
The contest end date serves to bring about a call to action with the urgency of the dateline approaching. Without setting a fixed dateline, potential participants will deem the blog owners who are running the blog contest as not being serious and this will actually hurt the participation rate of the blog contest. From the contestant’s point of view, with a fixed dateline, it also serves as a reminder to check back with the blog to see if they have won.

2. Not making the contest simple to participate.
Humans are by nature by and large lazy people. Ask most casual bloggers to run circles just to get their name in a draw for a contest and most of them will just give the contest a pass (unless of course the prize is so good and there are so little participation that they are a sure win). So unless you intend to have the few dedicated loyal readers who will do almost anything you say, follow the well known mantra. K.I.S.S (Keep it simple stupid).

3. Not making the effort to publicize the blog contest.
Well, this makes sense right? The fact that you are running a blog contest simply means you want a way of increasing your profile in terms of traffic and branding. For some, it could be to reward loyal readers, but it doesn’t hurt to have new readers to come your way. With more than 20+ contest blogs to help you publicize your blog contest, there’s no reason to not gain this free publicity. In fact, mention it ever so often in your regular post in case your new readers do not know that you are running a blog contest.

4. Not awarding prizes as promised
This is definitely a “No No” when it comes to blog contests. From just the past year alone, a few high profile bloggers have not fulfilled their end of the bargain. They have announced their winners but till today, the winners have not received their prizes. This have made their winners fuming mad and the negative reputation that comes with annoying bloggers are definitely not something you want to get when it comes to making it online. Remember, you run a blog contest to gain a good reputation, not to have annoyed bloggers plastering your bad reputation.

5. Not being seen as fair in choosing a winner.
This is probably one of the bigger mistakes that could also hurt your reputation. In the past, we have seen some blog contest owners choosing specifically some of the bigger blogs as the winners as the follow-on publicity that comes from those blogs when they blog about their winning could swell the blog’s traffic. But soon other bloggers caught on to this and the blog contest run by the very same people began losing people’s interest as the smaller blogs who contribute to the success of the blog contests knows they are being left out. So there must be a mechanism to show that the choosing of a winner is fair. Many choose to use random.org as the show of fairness. Soon you would be able to use the Blog Contest Central Tool to do the same thing.

With all these mistakes highlighted, I hope everyone would be able to run a good blog contest without making the same mistakes.

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One of the more interesting contests that a Blog can run is an SEO blog contest.

This is normally done for fun and the actual benefits to the blog running the contest itself is minimal. (Except for boasting rights in running the contest and some backlinks with the anchor word SEO if structured correctly.

The SEO blog contest rules.
Normally, the person running the SEO blog contest would chose a term to rank for the competition. To equal the start point for all the contestants, it would be better to choose an obscure term or even number that does not really appear any where on the Internet. (Or if it does, it should appear quite minimally)

This would help ensure that the contestants who actively practice SEO methods to rank for that term would get their site or blog listed in the first few search results when ranked by the search engine.

The key criteria for winning this type of blog contest are to rank the highest for the search term that is being challenged for in a specific search engine. The search engine should be defined as the SEO required for the different search engines might require different SEO strategies.

For a norm, the search results for the blog running the contest would normally be discounted granted that the backlinks created for the contest would normally help the blog running the contest rank for the obscure term.

An optional rule that you might want to play to make things even fairer (or for some people who do not want to “pollute” their own blogs with the obscure term) is for the participants to start a new blog on a new domain (This is sometimes the ultimate as you can get the keyword as the domain) or even use the free blog platforms like Wordpress or Blogspot to join the contest.

Suitable SEO Contest Time frame.
The time period for an SEO contest would normally be longer than an average blog contest. I would say that a period of 1 month would be a good time for such a contest as it gives the participants enough time to do some SEO experiments as well as time for the search engines to crawl and show relevancy for the blog or site.

What about the Prizes?
The participants of a SEO blog contest are normally people who would like to challenge themselves and are not really in it for the prizes. Sometimes boasting rights are enough as demonstrated in “The Human SEO contest” that gave a prize money of $20 and a backlink. The contest itself was quite successful in terms of number of participants but because of the way the contest was structured, a high PR blog came in on the last day and managed to win the prize. (The rest of the blogs that took part are PR0-3 type blogs)

But if your intention is to get more traffic and create a bigger buzz, a SEO contest with lots of prizes will also attract a larger spectrum of the citizens of the Blogosphere. SEO contest in the likes of SEO NooB where several categories of prizes are up for grabs (and the list is growing as more sponsors for prizes pour in)

What’s in it for the SEO contest participants?
Well, given the competitive nature of SEO’s in the real world for competitive terms, it’s really difficult to see how your knowledge of SEO has progress. If you gauge your SEO skills against a very competitive terms and see yourself come out very short (those terms have link centuries of SEO behind them vs your recent ventures), you would be discouraged.

Gauge it against a lowly ranked term and you do not have much competition to see if you really rank well against others. So, it is with a SEO contest where there are people actively trying to rank for a obscure term that you are able to gauge your progress in SEO knowledge.

So have you run a SEO contest today? Share some of your experience with us here.

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Want to know a little secret on how to increase the traffic to your blog contest post?

The usual way we structure a blog contest
When we run a blog contest, one of the benefits is to actually increase the amount of traffic to our site. It is with this intention that many blog contests require their participants to actually link back to their contest page so that readers of other blogs will also know about the contest.

With this method of running the blog contest, readers of other blogs will normally visit your site, and if you can provide some interesting content on your site, the visitors may just turn into loyal readers.

But have you ever thought that you can aid this process of having more visitors visit your blog by helping increase the traffic over at your participant’s blogs?

Helping bring traffic to another site to help my blog contest?
What was that? Help increase the amount of traffic at the participant’s blog? Wouldn’t that entails me promoting the participant’s blog? Wouldn’t that also mean that I’m taking my readers on a round trip, from my site to the participant’s site and back?

Well, not actually. When I mentioned increasing your participant’s site, it does not actually mean promoting them on your own blog.

Here’s the little secret to increase your blog contest traffic

For this to work, you would need for other blogs to actually blog about you. You can either do this through writing link baits which are so enticing that the other blogs want to write about or the other easier method is to run a blog contest, which requires other blogs to link back to you.

What you need to do is get some social media accounts. Accounts on Digg and StumbleUpon are great for this little trick. (And you might begin to link using StumbleUpon for it’s actual usage too). For every entry from every participants that link back to you, (You can see who links back through your WordPress Stats), go to their post and stumble it (or Digg it if you think it’s a good enough post to warrant a Digg). By doing so, you are helping that particular post gain some traffic from the social media means.

And when that happens, readers who stumble upon the article (which will be talking about your blog contest in the first place) would then visit your site via the participant’s blog.

Using this method, you can get a whole lot of traffic coming to visit your blog contest and getting a bigger participation rate.

Try it and let us know if this works for you.

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Have you ever wondered why some web sites or companies are willing to provide sponsorship in terms of prizes for someone else’s blog contest? Some of these prizes include cash or expensive life style consumer goods like the iPod Touch or even others like the latest game consoles.

Here are 10 good reasons why you should sponsor someone’s blog contest.

1. Creating a buzz for the service or siteThis is one of the reasons why anyone would want to run a blog contest in the first place. By providing a good prize for the contest, the readers and participants will take notice of who is sponsoring the prize and thus, a buzz is also created for your service and site.

2. Lesser administrative work associated with running a blog contestBy just sponsoring the prize for the blog contest run by someone else, you would achieve the aims of running a blog contest without the need to actually deal with the administrative overheads of running a blog contest. This would include answering emails with respect to the blog contest, keeping track of the entries, making sure each entry fulfills it’s entry requirements and other mundane stuff.

3. Outsourcing of the promotion effort

Every blog that runs a blog contest has the intention of making the blog contest one of the most talked about event happening in the blogosphere. That would mean that the blog that is running the contest would make quite an effort to promote the blog contest as best as they can. By just sponsoring a good blog contest prize, you can actually ride on the effort that the blog contest owner who will definitely try their best blog promotion out of the running the contest.

4. Getting a free review and free plug for your website

So, it’s not really free since you are paying a a prize but hey, it’s and additional fringe benefit from the sponsorship. Most, if not all, bloggers are always very grateful to their prize sponsors when they need to run a blog contest. They would normally give the sponsors a good review and plug the services of the sponsors. This third party endorsement of your service or product is definitely better than having to blow your own trumpet.

5. Gaining a new audience

Normally, if your website is about a specific niche, the people who will actively look for the topic would already have found your site. But people outside of the niche will have very little reason to specifically look for your website. By sponsoring a blog contest on someone else’s blog, you will be reaching a new set of readers who may become interested in your niche. Without the exposure given by the sponsorship of prizes on another blog’s topic, the new audience would never have searched for the topics in your niche because they do not really know of such a niche.

6. Gaining more backlinks

Running a blog contest with a good sponsored prize normally attracts a lot of participants. The contest rules can be written to ensure that the prize sponsors get in on the backlinks from each entry to the blog contest and thus gain additional backlinks and increase the authority of your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Targeted anchor words for specific pages and niche

For the above backlinks, specific rules can be specified in the blog contest to link specific pages of the sponsors services or products with relevant anchor text and thus give better relevancy of the sponsor’s blog with respect to the search engines when their spiders crawls the site.

8. Faster indexing of sponsor’s site by Search engine.

As blog contest with a good prize is often viral and the participants are from all over the blogosphere. Having heavily indexed site take part in the blog contest in which requirements are for specific anchor text and backlinks to you site will help your site be indexed faster by the various search engines.

9. Not tainting your web site with the wrong keywords

By only having relevant anchor text linked to you as the sponsor without the anchor text of “contest” associated with your site, your site will not be tainted with non relevant keywords which may confuse the search engine into misplacing your site in the wrong niche.

10. Building a blogging community

By exposing your services and products to the blogging community, you can impress the bloggers, who will if suitably impressed; want to talk about the interesting niche or service that you are proving. This will help build up your community spirit promotion effort which will last beyond the period of the blog contest.

So with so many benefits of sponsoring a blog contest, why don’t you sponsor a blog contest today? If you would like to sponsor a blog contest, do contact the blog owners through their contact forms. I’m sure they will be delighted to have someone approach them to run a contest. I can be contacted through my contact page.

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