Entries Tagged 'Blog contest howto' ↓

Many blogs run blog contests to improve the number of backlinks to their blog. Depending on how you run the contest, you would have different results with reference to how the search engines see you.

Most people will run the blog promotion by writing a contest post within their site and start asking readers to link to that post. Most (if not all) participants will by default give the anchor text of “blog contest” or something in the same meaning and link it to your post.

Negative aspects of badly structured blog contest for newer blogs?

Let’s take a look at this from the search engines point of view.

Your blog has a few backlinks going into some of your articles. Suddenly, there is an article that is attracting a lot of backlinks from everyone else. And the interesting thing about those backlinks is that most of them are saying the interesting article on your blog is about a blog contest. The search engine also notice that this blog contest post is getting the most backlinks compared to the other articles. The search engine might see this article as the pillar article of your site.

If you have a very established blog that has many backlinks coming into your blog’s various posts, then you would probably not face this small challenge.

So how can we structure our blog contest for better SEO?

One of the simple ways of structuring your blog contest to achieve better utilization of the backlinks that you would have would be to disperse the incoming backlinks to your pillar articles.Take for example, instead of asking for a backlink into the contest post, you might want to change the rules a bit and request your reader to read one of your pillar articles and link to it instead with some relevant anchor text . They should then leave a comment in your contest post that they have done so. They may not even have to link to your anchor post if you are doing the promotion via the contest blogs serving the community.

Using this method of dispersion the incoming backlinks to the various articles help to strengthen the “strength” of each pillar article and with the correct use of anchor words, the search engine will co-relate your site to a certain niche based on what keywords are strong in your site.

If you do not have strong pillar articles as yet when you are running your blog contest, you might want your participants to link back to your with your blog’s niche words rather than the word “contest”.

Share with us your experience on your results of holding blog contest.

Do you have any experience to share on the effects on search after you have run a blog contest? Share it with the rest of us either through the comments or you can also write up an article to post on this site.

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Earn at least 20 backlinks with your blog contest. We all know that for a web site to be relevant there should be citations to it in the forms of links from other site.

This is a form of social proof on the Internet and also the mechanism in which search engines see the relevancy of your site with respect to the rest of the Internet.

Can we guarantee at least 20 backlinks for the blog contest?

Taking into account that there are at least 20+ contest blogs and counting, you would think that you would have at least 20 backlinks. But this is not always true. Some of the contest blogs do not take part in every blog contest there is but are more selective in nature.

Based on observations over time, it can be seen that for a blog contest to generate at least 20 links, the prize and the entry requirements of the contest matters.

So how should I run my blog contest to get those backlinks?

Well, if your intention is to get those backlinks for the purpose of SEO, then you would probably have to fork out a cash prize of $100 or more. Cash being the most attractive prize for it’s fluidity will normally entice all the contest blogs to announce your contest and provide the back link required. You would then get at least 20 backlinks just from the contest blogs alone. (Remember to contact all the contest blogs about your contest)

Add to the fact that with all 20+ contest blogs announcing your contest, you can probably expect another 5 – 10 blogs entering the fray for your contest from the Top 5 contest blogs, which would give you an approximate total of 45 – 70 backlinks purely based on your blog contest.

The contest rules should keep to the K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) principal and only require the participants to write a short write-up and provide a simple link with your preferred anchor word.

A duration of 2 weeks should be enough for your blog contest as the buzz for the contest on the contest blog itself seldom last more than 2 weeks. This short duration will also give the participants a more urgent call to action.

Return on Investment for such a blog contest?

If done properly, your blog contest will earn you between an average of 50 backlinks. This divided by the cost to run the contest by giving out a prize of $100 means that you would have paid about $2 per backlink, which is quite a good investment.

Add to that, the buzz created will allow for your new visitors to see what is on your site and they might decide to stay on as loyal readers.

Try this out and let us know if you achieve the same experience by commenting on this article.

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Running a blog contest has never been easier, well, at least the promotion part of it. The contest blog niche has grown over the pst 6 months and many of the contest blogs are ranks highly in the Technorati rankings. Use this list as your list to promote all your blog contests and you can be sure that your message will go out to all in the blogosphere.

1. Contest Blogger (Technorati: 4093)
2. Laura William’s Musing (Technorati: 6442)
3. Contest Beat (Technorati: 9,481)
4. MyBlogContest
5. The Prize Blog
6. About Blog Contest
7. RevieWow
8. Blog Contest Site
9. Contester
10. Blog Contest on the Net
11. Link and Earn
12. Blogging Contest
13. My Blog Contests
14. The Contest Winner
15. Contest Blog Cat
16. Link Right Contest
17. Prize-a-thon
18. Contest Time
19. Expert Boss
20. Sumit Your Contest
21. Blog Paradise
22. Enter Now
23. Blogetition

This list will serve as a resource for blog owners who are looking for contest blogs to promote their blog contests and will be constantly updated. So if you are a contest blog and would like to be included in the list, drop me a note on my contact form and I’ll gladly add you to the list (provided you are a contest blog and has shown to be blogging about contest constantly)

If you’re a blog owner, you might want to let your other readers know about this list for their benefit.

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Running a blog contest is a good way to get some backlinks to you blog. If you have an attractive enough prize, you will gain at least 10 backlinks from all the contest blogs around. For the purpose of search engine optimization, it would be important to indicate which anchor text you would want to link to your site. So how can we choose good anchor text.

Here are 5 ways that you can take to choose relevant anchor text for your blog contest.

1. Use a few combinations of your theme.

Take for example the contest blog theme. You can use the following anchor text to help you rank better for these terms that are helpful to your niche.

2. Use contextual phase with the same meaning as your theme

Using the above example again, we can use keywords like “win a prize”, “blog context prizes”, “cash prize blog contest”. This will help your site rank for more phases connected to your theme as well as give the search engine a better idea of what your site is all about.

3. Use the Google Adwords Suggestion Tool.

You can use the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool to find out what terms are seen by the search engines to be related to your niche. For the blog contest niche, you have terms like “video blog contest”, “bikini blog contest” “blog competition” and “blog giveaway”. Choose phases that closely match your specific niche.

4. Find out what are the popular backlinks of the competitors site in the same niche

You can do a search on Yahoo Site Explorer for your competitor’s site and find out what the top site for your niche is having as anchor text for their backlinks.

5. Emphasis the keywords that users have found your web site by.

Through your own logs, you would notice that some of your traffic found you through certain keywords. These could be several pages deep in the Search Engine’s result page. Emphasis these keywords with more backlinks with these anchor text and you would probably ranks better for these keywords.

With these simple methods, you can make sure that the blog contest that you run have maximum returns in terms of both traffic and search optimization opportunities. In the long run, you would most probably see an increase in your Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP) for your site for the keywords that you asked your contestants to use.

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This article is part of How2Blogger’s Super Sexy Holiday ‘How To’ Contest which you can see at How2Blogger’s ‘How To’ site.

One of the many different genres of blog contests is the Comment Contest.

So why would anyone want to increase the level of comments on their blog. It’s really a a case of giving the perception of success and traffic on the blog. Traffic patterns on the Internet mimics the herd mentality. If we see people visiting the blogs (by the amount of comments the blog receives), we would naturally think that the blog has something good to offer us.

So how can we run a successfully comment contest. One of the ways is to run one that scales the level of the prize with the level of success of the comment contest.

You can always hold a draw for a prize after every x number of comments. The formula can be repeated for every x number of comments thereby ensuring that you have a certain level of success with the comments before giving out each prize.

In this way, you can ensure that your blog post are populated with comments and with it, the perception that your blog is a frequently visited site. This also gives a good reason for your visitors to become repeat visitors to your site.

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