Effective ways to promote your blog contest

Blog contests are one of the most efficient ways to build a strong brand for your blog and generate defensible traffic, and these days many people are doing the same, except that most fail at reaching their goals, and at the same time I’ve seen many blogs who reach sky heights with their contests. Most of them were big ones and provided huge prizes, but its until I realized that the main part of the success was on how they promoted the contest.

I have seen many people giving away single products or advertising spaces as prizes in their contests, which isn’t such a bad idea as its totally risk free and moreover its possible to do create such contests more often, but on the other side I see many blogs which host contests for one or two days on one single post, this is what I call as a waste of money or resources, as this is literally of no use. No matter what type of gifts you provide the main aim must be to keep the participants engaged for a longer period.

Firstly I would like to clarify a few misunderstandings in blog contests, if your asking for user content and judging the best one as the winner you can call it a contest, if you are randomly choosing a winner it can be called as sweeptakes and if your giving prizes to the first few to do something it’ll be known as a giveaway.

Now when you’ve got an idea for a long lasting contest ready, the only thing that would matter now is its promotion as more than content, promotion gets the value. I have organized a few successful giveaways in the past and almost all have achieved their goals. Promoting a contest isn’t really tough, its because internet users just love freebies and its this love which brings them from different corners of this world, so just a bit of promotion can lead to a viral chain.

Onsite exposure

Before starting a contest its necessary that you have an existing audience base as a contest cannot be a means of gaining initial traffic, but a way to grow your blog to bigger levels. So after you have an initial audience, the first thing you must do is to leverage your loyal readers to your contest, so the way to do this is to write a blog post announcing your contest and make sure you do all of your usual promotional methods for it. After awhile your sure to get a few participants depending on the traffic of your blog.

Later on start placing banners all over your blog and links at the bottom of all posts, which must all lead to your contest post, this way you’ll be announcing about your contest to all your random visitors from Google and other sources and this is surely a full fudge promotion of your contest.

Its recommended that you do all of these before or immediately after launching the contest as you want everything to begin with a big bang, so this way your blog will surely fill up the conversations in the social space.

User incentives

Most of the successful blog contests which have gone viral have either had a huge existing audience or have used their small loyal reader base to bring in more readers from outside. This can be efficiently done with the help of incentives for those who help your promote your contest. It might be of any sort, maybe blogging about your contest, or tweeting or sharing on Facebook, anything which you prefer most favorable.

Most people do this simply by announcing a separate reward for a section known as the best promoters and the prize to one of the many who would have written about your contest. This surely builds a huge following for not only your contest but a long term one for your blog. It works really well if you offer a cash prize for this, as your key target would be bloggers and webmasters, who would be really forced to participate if they find a new way to earn money.

Networking

The top two methods are actually more than enough to bring in enough participants and engage them till the end, but they are not likely to work really well in case you have a small contest offering small and un-motivational prizes, because it usually creates a big buzz in the beginning, but looses effect soon after launch.

So the ones who can keep your contest active till the end are your loyal readers and friends, as they’d do anything to get a personal thank you from you. Your blog’s regular readers can enter in this list, but you cannot effectively make use of them unless they are part of your community, thats why I recommend that you make your readers a part of your community.

Thats why I’ve recommended above that its best to start a contest after you’ve built your initial audience, or an existing network of bloggers or webmasters in your social sites. I’d mostly prefer mailing all my subscribers and then informing friends and fans on Facebook, and this would surely generate huge amounts of initial buzz for your site.

Contest blogs and forums

In case you haven’t heard of any, there are a hell lot of blogs and forums which write about the latest contests taking place around the web and these are usually user updated. A few of them include Online Sweepstakes, SweepsGoat, Sweepstakes Advantage and these are few of the most popular ones. I had posted but my free giveaway on all the three including a few others and I did get a few visitors from all. This didn’t really work for me at first, but I know many who have had great success with these.

This failed to work for me because the main audience here included tech and web design related surfers and blogging and make money online related contests didn’t stand a chance. So this is truly worth a try and its recommended that you submit it two days before the start of your contest as most of these sites take upto 2 days for approval.

Advertising

Nothing comes for free and even internet marketing the same principle is used, for promoting your contest nothing will be more targeted and efficient than an ad campaign on different platforms. This is advisable only if your planning a big contest which includes tons of money as cash prizes, because the conversion rates are usually low for small giveaways.

Firstly I’d start off with Facebook and Adwords and the traffic should lead directly to your contest page, if you’ve got a few more bucks to spare you can try blog advertising as well. This is sure to drive huge traffic and the conversion depends oon the type of keywords you target for your campaign.

Joint ventures

Your blog will be pushed to an all new audience if you’ve tied up with another blog or network, one fine example is my friend Sushant of Smartbloggerz who recently held a highly successful guest blogging contest, his contest would have been success even if he had just used the above methods, but he also chose to tie up with Myblogguest from which he got a huge response.

So joint ventures are really helpful, just contact a few fellow bloggers who have the same traffic as yours and ask them for a tie up, list a few terms and conditions on promotion, marketing and benefits and also on the expenses of the contest, if you have  few products or services you can promote them by giving it away as a prize on your friend’s blog.

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