Holding contests on your blog are a great way to increase your Twitter followers, increase your RSS subscribers and generate publicity for your blog. Many bloggers are interested in holding a blog contest, however, it is not very easy as there are lots of risks involved in holding a blog contest – especially if your blog is small and is still growing. There is a high possibility that very few people take part and it becomes a big flop. Also, a poorly performing blog contest will simply not achieve the goals that you are looking for.
In this post, I have explained in detail on how to host a blog contest. Also, the various aspects involved in hosting a blog contest are covered here in this post.
The first and the most basic aspect of hosting a blog contest is its promotion and a blogger must invest a lot of time to promote his contests.
Promotion
The first step before you holds a blog contest is that you promote it well. A poor promotion of your blog will result a very few number of participants. So it is important that you get the part of promotion right, if you promote your contest well then you are sure to get many new readers to your blog and many more people will come to know about your blog.
If you are one of those bloggers who get over 5k readers per day then you would want to focus on promoting the contest within your blog. Whereas, if your blog is small and the blog contest is a promotional attempt from your side, then you should focus intensively promoting the blog contest. This can be done by commenting on other blogs and also sending emails to bloggers you want to invite to your blog contest. Just be sure that you sound human when you mail them about your contests otherwise it will be quickly ignored and rejected as spam.
Analyze Your Traffic
Before you take any further steps you should do a research on your traffic. You can find out your unique visitors, bounce rate, repeating visitors, geographical location all through the Google Analytics dashboard. It is important that you analyze this data carefully because you have to make a lot of decision regarding your blog contest based on this data.
Duration of Contest
The next thing that you should do is to decide the duration of your contest – will it be stretched over a week or will it be a whole month before you shortlist the winner. Again, the decision to decide the duration of your contest should be based on the popularity of your blog. If your blog is not really the most popular site in the blogosphere then you should considering holding the contest for a longer duration just so that the word spreads.
If your blog is not too popular and the contest duration is too less then you face the possibility of poor reader participation and involvement in your blog contest.
What Will You Give Away?
This is the point in which most of your participants would be interested in knowing. If you really want to motivate your blog readers to take part in your blog contest then it is very important that you provide attractive prizes to the winner. Also, it is recommended that you give away something that is useful to all participants.
Many things can be used as prize for your blog contest. You may choose a cash prize, a premium theme to the winner or a year of free web hosting etc. But all of this will cost you money and if your contest does not become as successful as you want it to then you will face losses. On the other hand, many smart bloggers acquire advertisers to bear giving away the prize. In return, obviously they will get publicity as the contest sponsors.
If you want you can also give a prize that does not require sponsors and is absolutely free for you. This can be done in the form of a review or a free ad spot on your blog for a month or for half-year. But you have to be careful that the prize you give to your contestants is at par to the contest which you are hosting. It means that the bloggers should feel that the prize is worth the time they devote for the blog contest.
Rules of the Contest
This is the area where you can decide what benefits you would want out of this contest. Here you will also set what the objective of your participant is. Your rules can be as simple as subscribing to the RSS feed by email and comment under the giveaway post – then the winner is randomly chosen.
Finally, it is your creativity to decide what contest you want to hold. The success of your blog contest will mainly depend on the kind of promotion that you do for it. Also make sure that the prize you give away is something that is desirable.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Have you got any suggestions as to drumming up interest from outside your general readership?
Interesting post. Doesn’t the idea of running a competition only become valid once you have a certain “critical mass” of readers along with a substantial amount of content? I can’t really see the use of running a comp if you currently have less than a thousand readers.
Apart from readers, it also depends upon how you promote it. I would suggest contacting lots of bloggers in your niche and sharing it on your social media accounts where ever you are active
I did a contest recently with one of my blogs, I had a contest to win a physical book that was very relevant to the blog readers – a big tutorial book.
Unfortunately it didn’t go over so well. At the time I didn’t have enough active people on my blog so the only ones that really did participate were the handful that had become regulars.
I would suggest going broad with what you’re offering. Everyone is game for an iPod or iPad because it appeals to everyone, they’ll easily retweet to win it.
You just need to make sure you’ve set up a system where you benefit from the contest. Capturing emails, making sales and so forth.