What It Takes to Create a Not so Killer but Highly Participated Blog Contest

These days, a lot of blogs are holding contests. It’s a trend that bloggers are quick to adopt because of the benefits they could get out of it. That’s because a blog contest is a powerful marketing tool to get blogs better exposure. Get more traffic, backlinks, readers, Technorati ranking, etc; it’s all about increasing blog stats to improve your blog’s authority.

What’s a blog contest?

A blog contest is just your usual online contest that is conducted by blogs to build publicity, recognition, and/or networks. A blog contest cannot be a contest without prizes. These prizes range from entrecard credits to real cash, gadgets, advertising spots, reviews, and other valuable online merchandise and services you could think of. Getting entries to win usually requires a participant to do some things that will benefit the contest host and his/her blog.

How do you benefit from holding blog contests?

Your blog can benefit from a contest in a lot of ways depending on your contest’s rules/mechanics and how well you promoted it; but generally, these are the areas where you’ll see much improvement and what most contest runners hope to improve after conducting it:

• More backlinks
• Increased Google, Technorati, and Alexa rankings
• More readers (subscribers and return visits)
• More traffic

How to Setup a Blog Contest?

Running a contest is not as easy as it looks. It requires a lot of effort to coordinate with everyone you want to get involved from its conception to the handing-over of prizes to the winners. If you’re planning of running one, here’s a guide which could help you.

There are 4 aspects to keep in mind when you decide to run a blog contest:

1. Your goals
2. The prizes
3. The game mechanics
4. Promotion

Goals

You don’t just hold a contest with nothing in mind. Think first of what you hope to achieve after conducting the contest, which will determine the competition’s success. It could be increasing your RSS subscribers, increasing your backlinks, increasing your stats, and any blog related increase you have in mind. Once you have your goals, you can then make better decisions around the competition format, prizes, promotion etc.

Prizes

Generally, the bigger your prizes are, the more buzz you’ll potentially make but it all depends on how much you’re willing to spend for your contest and how many sponsors you’ll get. If you’re not very experienced when it comes to marketing your ideas or is fairly new to blogging, it’s best to keep your prizes simple but useful.

Don’t give prizes that your contestants have no use for or you’ll end up with few or no participants at all. The best prizes are those relevant to your niche to hook up contestants that will better appreciate them. For many blogger contestants, entrecard credits are always a way to go, but you have to put the non-entrecarders into consideration as well. Cash is often the best form of prize but always try to come up with a considerably better value since a mere $10 will brand your contest as cheap. Regarding blogging tools, e-books, services, and other products; it’s best to put their monetary value as well so everyone will see how much they’re worth.

Besides the prizes for winners, a contest will get better reception if it has incentives for all the participants. Something like a free e-book, 10ec, or a linkback in the form of daily or weekly round up of participants for every contestant can be a start.

Before going all out with your prizes, always remember that giving away big ones is not a sure way to get your competition successful without knowing what sort of and how many response you might get. Also, if there’s shipping involved for the delivery of your prize, consider also the geographic constraints of such a medium. Try offering a prize equivalent like a PayPal deposit to encourage others to participate.

Rules of the game

Like said earlier, the mechanics on how to enter your competition always depend on what your goals are for holding one. You could require participants to comment in your post, subscribe to your feed through email, favorite your blog in Technorati, write about your contest, Stumble, or Digg before they could join your competition. It all depends on you. But more often than not, your participants are also as busy (or lazy) as you in their blogging careers, and if you make it hard for everyone to enter your competition, you’ll get less response from them. Keeping your contest requirements simple and quick will ensure more participation from your potential contestants.

From what I’ve been reading lately, contests that require people to write about it and its sponsors are getting less and less popularity unless it’s conducted by popular blogs with prizes that’s highly sought after. In most contests that I’ve seen so far, usually, the time consuming requirements to enter end up as optional means to get more entries to better a contestant’s odds of winning. Maybe it’s a better contest model that’s why more people do it, don’t you think?

Make your rules easy for you too. When you get a lot of entries that require you to sift through them all, moderate them, judge them etc. It can take a lot of time. Sometimes you might give them too many options to get entries that it becomes difficult for you to track their activities down. Think about things first like if there’s any way for you to automate processes or find others to help you with the logistics. Make it easy for both you and your contestants so everyone will benefit from it.
Another idea which you might want to incorporate in your contest is making it work around a certain theme or concept. Most of the successful and popular contests used unique ideas that presented something new or challenging to their readers. It adds a particular viral quality to your contest which let those participating spread the word in some way.

A reasonable time frame in which your contest will run is also important for your contest to be successful. Running a competition for a very long time often loses its momentum and presents problems especially to those who joined first. People believe that the longer your contest run, the more participants it will get. It’s wrong simply because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be getting interested parties to your contest through time alone. If you set the deadline to more than a month, within two to three weeks, your contest will start to get stale. What’s more is that your participants will start forgetting about your contest losing its element of fun and excitement. The ideal timeframe for you to conduct your contest, I believe, is within two to three weeks only; enough for the word to spread, for participants to join, and for sponsors to get their money’s worth.

Finally, write your rules clearly. Enumerate them and spell out the parameters to be qualified in the draw. It’s difficult when your contestants can’t understand what you want them to do. Inform them also about what they can expect from your contest if your winners will be picked subjectively (best submissions), or randomly (through some randomizer tool).

Promotion

For a contest to be successful, it needs many participants. And you’re in no way to get as many when you’re not promoting your contest effectively. Another purpose of your contest promotion is to pull in as many sponsors as possible to provide more and better prizes. Of course, it’s always up to you if you would require the help of sponsors or not.

If you’re interested in getting sponsors, try contacting your fellow bloggers first if they would be interested in becoming your contest sponsors. Tell them what’s in store for them if they become your sponsors like a free review, lots of backlinks, a month long spot in your ad spaces, etc. There’s no one who’ll better understand and relate to what you’re going through than them.

If your contest is really big or if it’s really promising (depends on how you see it), you can try contacting companies if they are willing to be sponsors. You have to put extra effort here in selling your blog’s nice stats and what your blog and your contest can offer to them. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get some of them to answer your plea.

When looking for sponsors, it’s best to conduct the search early on before you announce the call for contestants itself so that you can plan ahead how you’d run the contest based on the prizes you’ve managed to collect. You can start by making a post about your desire to find sponsors to grab the attention of those interested to offer their hand but you have no contact to. You can also try entrecard’s messaging system, as I’ve received countless offers of being a contest sponsor through it. And then there’s the traditional email, forums, and IM. Then there’s a tip I got from a blog contest article where “you can publish your request on sites like ProfNet” to find suitable sponsors for your contest.

To get more participants for your blog, you have to promote your contest to as many venues as possible. Start by promoting it in social media sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter, BlogCatalog, etc. Invite your blogger contacts if they could join or help you spread the word, or try posting in forums, and commenting in other blogs. If your contest mechanics were made in such a way that your contest will be promoted easily across the blogosphere, then expect your call for participants to spread fast enough.

If you’ve noticed also, there are blogs and sites dedicated to announcing ongoing contests across the blogosphere. All you need to do is submit your contest to them. Sites like Contest Blogger, The Prize Blog, A.B.C. - About Blog Contests, and A Contest Blog are just a few examples. Please note that some contest submission sites require fees to get your contest listed or be featured.

Some bloggers resort to modifying their entrecard effectively to announce their ongoing contests. They create their 125 x 125 ads to do the announcing of their ongoing contest by including their best prize in big letters for everyone to see. Then they do frequent rounds of relentless dropping and relentless buying of advertising slots as well. Sometimes, also, they match it with changing their landing pages to the contest post they made. Others maximize what entrecard can offer by frequenting the entrecard forums and announce their contest there once a day.

These efforts you made to link back to your contest to promote it will not only get you your much needed participants but could also serve as backlinks that could help you in improving your rankings. So, don’t hesitate to make lots of them.

Other things to consider

When you’re expecting huge submissions for your contest, always make sure that you employ some form of system or methodology to track down your contestants activity. There’s nothing that could ruin your competition than having your contestants boycott you for being unfair just because you were unable to account for all of their submissions to enter the contest effectively.

Always correct the mistakes when you see one. Even how minimal it may appear, it has the potential to cause troubles in the flow of the contest especially if it accumulates.

Send your prizes as soon as possible. Don’t make your winners wait for half a year before they get their prize.

Live up to your word. If your deadline is after three weeks and the draw date on the next day, then make sure that when it comes your contestants will be able to see the results of your draws not later than two days after the draw date. Don’t change the rules all the time especially after the contest has already been started. That’s part of keeping up to your word. You should have overseen things right before you launched your contest.

Lastly, don’t raise your hopes up too much. Although there have been successful contests, there have also been failures. Don’t expect your blog to perform better afterwards. Although they have the capacity, running contests is not the only and perfect way to increase your blog’s stats and RSS feed count. Nonetheless, blog contests bring more fun and personality to your site and help build friendly relationships with your readers.

Oh yeah, one more thing. In case you're not that interested in holding contests yet, how about joining two of my recently sponsored contests:

• Pinay Mommy's Birthday Bash
• TheGermz.com's Birthday Contest

There's also another contest which I could've promoted along with these two but, unfortunately, this post didn't quite make it in time before its deadline. Anyways, here's it's link: Blog Me The Money's Summer Kickoff Contest.

technorati tags: blog contest, blog promotion, blog tips

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