The 5 mistakes that no blog should ever make in a blog contest

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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