Jun
Keep In Mind When Running Contests
Is it just me or does every single make money blog out there seem to have contests as a large source of traffic and gaining RSS Subscribers? I realize there are some people that sign up for content, however it seems as though many people will sign up simply for contests. Are you really helping your blog by running these contests? Some of my personal thoughts on this.
First of all, the traffic you are receiving is not real. It will be mostly one or two time visitors that heard about your contest from a post on another blog. This will lead them there for one purpose and one purpose only, your contest. They will probably sign up for your RSS Feed if it’s a RSS only contest. After the contest is done they either forget your site, or drop it from their feed. After a contest it wouldn’t be unlikely to see a drop in subscribers.
You can benefit from these contests. Let’s say your blog is big enough that companies or bloggers donate your prizes. If your prizes aren’t purchased by you, you’re not going to lose anything. No matter what you think, if you’re paying for your prizes it won’t make you back your money in the long run. The contest will be the extent of your benefits with the extra traffic sent to your site.
What types of contests are the most beneficial to the blog? Contests that are “random” drawings. The entrants name is played in the drawing x-times. A way to get in the drawing could be through comments, guest posts, writing a review of your blog, or many other ways that will benefit you. Make the time line around a month if there are a couple of good prizes. If there are indeed more than one good prize you may actually have quite a few people actively trying to obtain as many submissions into the drawing as possible.
Another cool contest idea was one I saw on a make money blog called bloggernoob. It was a domain tournament, but it’s not so much the domain part of it, rather the tournament. The contest was a free entrance and for each entrant he would put in $x. After 32 people entered it was like an NCAA tournament. 32-16-8-4-2-1. You could vote only once per ip address. It seemed to receive a decent amount of traffic. The sites entered in it will most likely alert their websites readers of the contest in order to get votes, and this will increase your chances of getting some targeted readers.
These are just two of many different contests. Experiment with them, some things may work better depending upon your niche. Do I plan to hold contests? Yes, but they wouldn’t be with my earnings. Bloggers are generally earning less than they would make at minimum wage, and I can’t afford to donate my earnings towards contests at the current time, because there are no earnings. I would be more than open to a contest where I received some donations because I believe if you run it correctly you can get quite a few subscribers and make a few bucks off of it.
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