Article in SEO

One of the hardest things to do when building a new blog is to get traffic to it. You can initially start doing that by commenting on other blogs, article writing and paying for some advertising. But once you get a little traffic, one of the best ways to get a big jump in the number of people coming to your blog is to hold a contest.

As of late this seems to be an increasingly popular method of traffic generation so the prizes being offered are beginning to increase in value. Typically a prize value between $50 to $100 is a good place to start. You can offer things like Amazon gift certificates, free advertising on your blog, books, software, training programs or Internet marketing ebooks, free reviews and lots more. If you are worried about the cost and think advertising might be a better way to spend your money on a limited budget, a blog contest, if run the right way, will have far better residual effects than the same money spent on buying ads.

The reason blog contests are so effective is that people love to win prizes and they are willing to do just about anything to do so. With that in mind, when you run a contest the best thing to do is to ask people to perform certain actions to gain entry. Conditions to enter could be something like blogging about the contest and linking back to it, or requiring entrants to sign up for your rss feed, or having your readers give you a boost at social book marking sites such as StumbleUpon, Technorati and others. You can either have people perform these actions once or multiple times for them to earn more points or entries into the contest.

The entire point of asking people to do these things is to generate more buzz for your contest, get incoming links, more rss subscribers and generally get more exposure for your blog. This is where the residual effects will continue to help long after the contest is over. The more links you get and more readers you aquire will give you benefits way beyond the $100 you may spend on a prize.

Many of the things that you will be asking your readers to do are things that need to be done any way to promote your blog. So offering a $100 prize in your contest is in essence hiring people to do your work for you. And if the right people, such as top bloggers, write about your contest, you may get a lot more exposure that $100 could ever buy.

Of course you must put a time limit on the contest and a good time frame is to run it for a minimum of 2 weeks and a maximum of 1 month. Any less than 2 weeks and it may not get the exposure you’re looking for and any longer than a month people will get bored with it and may forget about it.

The only drawback of running a contest is that if they are spaced too close to other contests running in the blogosphere, people can get tired of them. That’s part of the reason the cost and cache of prizes continues to escalate. Bloggers are trying to overcome the amount of contests with bigger and better prizes to keep people interested. If you are on a limited budget however, it’s probably best to keep an eye on your favorite blogs to find a lull in the contest frenzy so you can offer up your special deal.

Any way you look at it contests are a great way to generate buzz, links, subscriber and ultimately more visitors to your blog. Used wisely they can benefit you in ways that greatly exceed the initial cost of running the contest.