Novice Bloggers

6 ways to have contests on your blog

Posted on 10. Nov, 2009 by Senthil Ramesh in Blogging for beginners

For the past few years there are more and more blogs coming out. Students, business men, tech geeks ,literally everyone has a blog now and keeps their thoughts posted. Following the blogs, so many things have started along with it. One of them is having contests at blog.

Though conducting contests is more familiar for many years, blogs made it increase in numbers. Blog and site owners showed interests in having contests at their site making it open for more readers, getting some traffic etc.., But whatever it is, contests will help both the site owners and those who win (but don’t avoid participating). Basically the contests are conducted for increase of visitors to your site and converting them into constant readers. This can help you grow. And the contest are more beneficial if you are new in Blogging and has some sponsor for you to enhance your contest giveaways.

I have recently had an Idea why shouldn’t I try writing a post on the various ways to contest on Blog. We are not dealing with the give away or the prizes for the winners, for now. It may be anything of money, a book or a theme or even a small ad space in your site for free. But all that matters is how efficiently you run the contests and make the readers to participate in that.

1.Who comments most wins:

This contest is very useful to WordPress blogs and you can have the proof of the winners as soon as they comment. According to this,the one who comments most in the blog, wins. WordPress has a top commentator widget that allows to see who is the most commentator in a given period of time. This lets users to comment more and let track of their comments and their positions. As the contest held in Teenius, it rewards prizes to those who comment most and also who does the best comment(this is a cool technique that will not disappoint the one who made a good comment but not able to comment more). That’s a good work from Teenius.

2.Spread more and you win:

If you tweet more on the post, you are the winner. This is not so easy to track as that of Top Commentator but I never said you cant. There are so many ways to track your tweets. I saw a contest at SiteSketch101.com which simply tracks the tweets from the users by BackTweets. Winners are declared by the maximum number of times they tweeted on articles in the blog. A small variation of this contest can make spreading the article through any of the social bookmarking site like Digg, Delecious etc.., You can give them more priority who submits first and who bookmarks at most no of bookmarking sites (not secondary ones)

3. Subscription by email:

This can increase your readers easily. Sites like Feedburner can track number of Readers through Email also you can ask the Readers to have some copy of mails sent to you for subscribing to the Blogs. One disadvantage of this is you can immediately lose the readers, after the contests being over, unless you maintain the good content in your site and keep them stick around.

4. Subscription by RSS:

This is same as of the above. Subscribe via RSS and you can win some prizes. This is what the theme of such contests and both the above one and this chooses Randomly but by not any numbers(as you cant subscribe more than once using one email or one reader account ). People use many techniques to select winners randomly. There are even sites that help you to select the random one among the group.

5.Best Reviewer gets the Prize:

One of the best followed technique of all the time.

“Review my site, keep yourselves on, say the positives and negatives, stay unbiased and here you go, you win”.

This is the concept. There are so many contests coming often to review the sites, I noted one at DailySEOBlog, where you can win a Premium Domain for Free(but the contest utterly failed, and Mani, had stated reasons for his failure there). There are places like Alexa where you can review the site and inform the site owners about it and site owners can consider this type of Reviews too included in Contest.

6. All in one:

Simple one. Making all the above things mixed and providing points for each one. This can increase your readers, followers enormously and I feel this is the best one to go. This can also include following in Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook, posting tweets (already mentioned in point #2) etc.., Here is the example for such contest. But People will not do all the things unless you provide the reward worth of this. So make sure that you have the worthy reward for the type of contest you conduct. You can watch our blog for the next post where we deal with the various give aways you can provide for the winners in the contests.

Selecting winners:

Selecting winners of your contest is basically depends on what is the contest you are conducting.

• For #1 and #2 you can adjudge the winner easily by numbers.
• #3 and #4 requires you to select the winner by randomly like choosing from lots or making lucky number live to the readers as they conduct many of lucky draw. There are even sites Random.org that can select Random number and you can adjudge the winner.
• #5 requires you to carefully go through the reviews and you can have your friend to select the best one and as said in #6 you can have the points for each thing user does, select the one with most points and have a lucky draw if the points are same.

One contest is running now where you can participate and win cash.

In the next post,we will see about what can you select for tips for what can you give in your blog as prizes for your blog contests. So stay updated through my RSS feed.

Related posts:

1. How to increase Traffic during Contests Part II
2. How to Increase Traffic during Contests – Part I
3. Proven ways to Encourage Comments in Your Blog Part I
4. 6 Ways to Keep your visitors returning back
5. Grab Google Wave and Orkut invites – Winners Announced

Tags: Blogging for beginners, contests